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: 54
Born: 1969
Born: December 20
Journalist
Philosopher
Publisher
Writer
City of Zurich
Alain De Botton
Company
Responses
Keep
Temper
Others
Curiosity
World
Fit
Expectations
Response
Friendship
Crucially
Travel
Moulded

More quotes by Alain de Botton

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We accept the need to train extensively to fly a plane but think instinct should be enough for marrying and raising kids.
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A good half of the art of living is resilience.
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It seems that most of us could benefit from a brush with a near-fatal disaster to help us recognise the important things that we are too defeated or embittered to recognise from day to day.
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Artistic accounts involve severe abbreviations of what reality will force upon us.
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Not everyone is worth listening to.
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We are all more intelligent than we are capable, and awareness of the insanity of love has never saved anyone from the disease.
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Booksellers are the most valuable destination for the lonely, given the numbers of books that were written because authors couldn't find anyone to talk to.
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There is psychological pleasure in this takeoff, too, for the swiftness of the plane’s ascent is an exemplary symbol of transformation. The display of power can inspire us to imagine analogous, decisive shifts in our own lives, to imagine that we, too, might one day surge above much that now looms over us.” P. 38-39
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At the heart of every frustration lies a basic structure: the collision of a wish with an unyielding reality.
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We are continuously challenged to discover new works of culture—and, in the process, we don’t allow any one of them to assume a weight in our minds.
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The challenge of modern relationships: how to prove more interesting than the other's smartphone.
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Mental health: having enough safe places in your mind for your thoughts to settle.
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Arguments are like eels: however logical, they may slip from the minds weak grasp unless fixed there by imagery and style.
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We need a home in the psychological sense as much as we need one in the physical: to compensate for a vulnerability. We need a refuge to shore up our states of mind, because so much of the world is opposed to our allegiances. We need our rooms to align us to desirable versions of ourselves and to keep alive the important, evanescent sides of us.
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Taking architecture seriously therefore makes some singular and strenuous demands upon us...It means conceding that we are inconveniently vulnerable to the colour of our wallpaper and that our sense of purpose may be derailed by an unfortunate bedspread
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Most of our childhood is stored not in photos, but in certain biscuits, lights of day, smells, textures of carpet.
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Anxiety is the handmaiden of contemporary ambition.
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Reputation matters so much only because people so seldom think for themselves.
Alain de Botton
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As an atheist, I think there are lots of things religions get up to which are of value to non-believers - and one of those things is trying to be a bit better than we normally manage to be.
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Memory is... similar to anticipation: an instrument of simplification and selection.
Alain de Botton