Quote

If our lives are dominated by a search for happiness, then perhaps few activities reveal as much about the dynamics of this quest - in all its ardour and paradoxes - than our travels.

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
Activity
Dynamics
Perhaps
Dominated
Happiness
Quests
Lives
Quest
Much
Reveal
Paradox
Ardour
Activities
Paradoxes
Search
Travels

More quotes by Alain de Botton

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It's perhaps easier now than ever before to make a good living it's perhaps harder than ever before to stay calm, to be free of career anxiety.
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You normally have to be bashed about a bit by life to see the point of daffodils, sunsets and uneventful nice days.
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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.
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The real issue is not whether baking biscuits is meaningful, but the extent to which the activity can seem to be so after it has been continuously stretched and subdivided across five thousand lives.
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Kant and Hegel are interesting thinkers. But I am happy to insist that they are also terrible writers.
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Forgiveness requires a sense that bad behaviour is a sign of suffering rather than malice.
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Rather than getting more spoilt with age, as difficulties pile up, epiphanies of gratitude abound.
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Bad art might be defined as a series of bad choices about what to show and what to leave out.
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Curiosity might be pictured as being made up of chains of small questions extending outwards, sometimes over huge distances, from a central hub composed of a few blunt, large questions.
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Don't despair: despair suggests you are in total control and know what is coming. You don't - surrender to events with hope.
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A danger of travel is that we see things at the wrong time, before we have had a chance to build up the necessary receptivity and when new information is therefore as useless and fugitive as necklace beads without a connecting chain.
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Our minds are susceptible to the influence of external voices telling us what we require to be satisfied, voices that may drown out the faint sounds emitted by our souls and distract us from the careful, arduous task of accurately naming our priorities.
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What is fascinating about marriage is why anyone wants to get married.
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The degree of sympathy we feel regarding another's fiasco is directly proportional to how easy or difficult it is for us to imagine ourselves, under like circumstances, making a similar mistake.
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It wasn't only fanatics and drunkards who began conversations with strangers in public.
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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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There are people who say, 'Oh this guy is quite thick.' I think the reason is that, increasingly, I don't mind being simple in terms of literary expression. Others say, 'No, no, no. He went to Cambridge. He got a good degree. He must be Einstein.'
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Once I began to consider everything as being of potential interest, objects released latent layers of value.
Alain de Botton
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I assemble my ideas in pieces on a computer file, then gradually find a place for them on a piece of scaffolding I erect.
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It was no longer her absence that wounded me, but my growing indifference to it. Forgetting, however calming, was also a reminder of infidelity to what I had at one time held so dear.
Alain de Botton