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The activities of drawing, eating and drinking, all involve assimilations by the self of desirable elements from the world, a transfer of goodness from without to within.

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
Without
Activities
Self
Drawing
World
Drinking
Goodness
Assimilation
Elements
Transfer
Eating
Transfers
Activity
Involve
Within
Desirable

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A good half of the art of living is resilience.
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Art cannot single-handedly create enthusiasm... it merely contributes to enthusiasm and guides us to be more conscious of feelings that we might previously have experienced only tentatively or hurriedly.
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There is a devilishly direct relationship between the significance of an idea and how nervous we become at the prospect of having to think about it.
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what we call a home is merely any place that succeeds in making more consistenly available to us the important truths which the wider world ignores, or which our distracted and irresolute selves have trouble holding onto. (p123) Architecture of Happiness
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Writing isn’t a career choice. It’s self-medication that over time precipitates the madness it was meant to ward off.
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Anyone who isn't embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn't learning enough.
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The more dignity is widely and freely available in a society, the less people want to be famous.
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Let's say you went to Harvard or Oxford or Cambridge, and you said, 'I've come here because I'm in search of morality, guidance and consolation I want to know how to live,' - they would show you the way to the insane asylum.
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A dominant impulse on encountering beauty is to wish to hold on to it, to possess it and give it weight in one’s life. There is an urge to say, ‘I was here, I saw this and it mattered to me.
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Bad architecture is in the end as much a failure of psychology as of design. It is an example expressed through materials of the same tendencies which in other domains will lead us to marry the wrong people, choose inappropriate jobs and book unsuccessful holidays: the tendency not to understand who we are and what will satisfy us.
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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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Never, ever become a writer. It's a nightmare.
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Maturity: the confidence to have no opinions on many things.
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Not everyone is worth listening to.
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One of love's greatest drawbacks is that, for a while at least, it is in danger of making us happy.
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Unhappiness can stem from having only one perspective to play with.
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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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The media insists on taking what someone didn't mean to say as being far closer to the truth than what they did.
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I learnt to stop fantasising about the perfect job or the perfect relationship because that can actually be an excuse for not living.
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In Britain, because I live here, I can also run into problems of envy and competition. But all this is just in a day's work for a writer. You can't put stuff out there without someone calling you a complete fool. Oh, well.
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