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Unhappiness can stem from having only one perspective to play with.

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
Unhappiness
Perspective
Happiness
Play
Stem

More quotes by Alain de Botton

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My writing always came out of a very personal place, out of an attempt to stay sane.
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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.
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The materialistic view of happiness of our age starkly revealed in our understanding of the word luxury.
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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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Our homes do not have to offer us permanent occupancy or store our clothes to merit the name. To speak of home in relation to a building is simply to recognise its harmony with our own prized internal song. Home can be an airport or a library, a garden or a motorway diner.
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The only people we can think of as normal are those we don't yet know very well.
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Our capacity to draw happiness from aesthetic objects or material goods in fact seems critically dependent on our first satisfying a more important range of emotional or psychological needs, among them the need for understanding, for love, expression and respect.
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Year-end financial statements express a truth about office life which is no less irrefutable yet also, in the end, no less irrelevant or irritating than an evolutionary biologist's proud reminder that the purpose of existence lies in the propagation of our genes.
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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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One of the best protections against disappointment is to have a lot going on.
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The telephone becomes an instrument of torture in the demonic hands of a beloved who doesn't call.
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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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According to Montaigne, it was the oppressive notion that we had complete mental control over our bodies, and the horror of departing from this portrait of normality, that had left the man unable to perform sexually.
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The secular world is full of holes. We have secularized badly.
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Being content is perhaps no less easy than playing the violin well: and requires no less practice.
Alain de Botton
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It is perhaps sad books that best console us when we are sad, and to lonely service stations that we should drive when there is no one for us to hold or love.
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Reputation matters so much only because people so seldom think for themselves.
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The challenge for a human now is to be more interesting to another than his or her smartphone.
Alain de Botton
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The desire for high status is never stronger than in situations where ordinary life fails to answer a median need for dignity and comfort.
Alain de Botton
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Artistic accounts involve severe abbreviations of what reality will force upon us.
Alain de Botton