Quote

Our responses to the world are crucially moulded by the company we keep, for we temper our curiosity to fit in with the expectations of others.

Alain de Botton

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Alain de Botton
Age: 55
Born: 1969
Born: December 20
Journalist
Philosopher
Publisher
Writer
City of Zurich
Alain De Botton
Travel
Moulded
Company
Responses
Keep
Temper
Others
Curiosity
World
Fit
Expectations
Response
Friendship
Crucially

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Travel agents would be wiser to ask us what we hope to change about our lives rather than simply where we wish to go.
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The pleasure we derive from journeys is perhaps dependent more on the mindset with which we travel than on the destination we travel to.
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In their different ways, art and philosophy help us, in Schopenhauer's words, to turn pain into knowledge.
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The mind does most of its best thinking when we aren't there. The answers are there in the morning.
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I went to church and couldn't swallow it. The music was nice but I don't belong there.
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The happiness that may emerge from taking a second look is central to Proust's therapeutic conception. It reveals the extent to which our dissatisfactions may be the result of failing to look properly at our lives rather than the result of anything inherently deficient about them.
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Without sex, we would be dangerously invulnerable. We might believe we were not ridiculous. We wouldn't know rejection and humiliation so intimately.
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Work is most fulfilling when you're at the comfortable, exciting edge of not quite knowing what you are doing.
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The best cure for one's bad tendencies is to see them in action in another person.
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Socrates, on being insulted in the marketplace, asked by a passerby, Don't you worry about being called names? retorted, Why? Do you think I should resent it if an ass had kicked me?
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Happiness is impossible for longer than 15 minutes. We are the descendants of creatures who, above all else, worried.
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The inability to live in the present lies in the fear of leaving the sheltered position of anticipation or memory, and so of admitting that this is the only life that one is ever likely (heavenly intervention aside) to live.
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The only way to be happy is to realise how much depends on how you look at things
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The more closely we analyze what we consider 'sexy,' the more clearly we will understand that eroticism is the feeling of excitement we experience at finding another human being who shares our values and our sense of the meaning of existence.
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Mental health: having enough safe places in your mind for your thoughts to settle.
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A lump rises in our throat at the sight of beauty from an implicit knowledge that the happiness it hints at is the exception.
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I passionately believe that's it's not just what you say that counts, it's also how you say it - that the success of your argument critically depends on your manner of presenting it.
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One wants never to give up this crystalline perspective. One wants to keep counterpositioning home with what one knows of alternative realities, as they exist in Tunis or Hyderabad. One wants never to forget that nothing here is normal, that the streets are different in Wisebaden, and Louyang, that this is just one of many possible worlds.
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Only as we mature does affection begin to depend on achievement.
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We need objects to remind us of the commitments we've made. That carpet from Morocco reminds us of the impulsive, freedom-loving side of ourselves we're in danger of losing touch with. Beautiful furniture gives us something to live up to. All designed objects are propaganda for a way of life.
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