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It is not just nature that defies us. Human life is as overwhelming... If we spend time in it [the vast spaces of nature], they may help us to accept more graciously the great, unfathomable events that molest our lives and will inevitably return us to dust.

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
Humans
Events
Inevitably
Great
Space
Overwhelming
Time
Help
Vast
Life
Lives
Dust
Molest
Helping
Accept
Graciously
Nature
Spend
Defies
May
Return
Unfathomable
Human
Accepting
Spaces

More quotes by Alain de Botton

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To be shown love is to feel ourselves the object of concern: our presence is noted, our name is registered, our views are listened to, our failings are treated with indulgence and our needs are ministered to. And under such care, we flourish.
Alain de Botton
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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.
Alain de Botton
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Love is an incurable disease. In love, there is permanent suffering. Those who love and those who are happy are not the same.
Alain de Botton
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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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Everyone wants a better life: very few of us want to be better people.
Alain de Botton
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The materialistic view of happiness of our age starkly revealed in our understanding of the word luxury.
Alain de Botton
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Despite its maddeningly vague, inarticulate form, anxiety is almost always trying to tell you something useful and apposite.
Alain de Botton
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Reputation matters so much only because people so seldom think for themselves.
Alain de Botton
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As we write, so we build: to keep a record of what matters to us.
Alain de Botton
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What is fascinating about marriage is why anyone wants to get married.
Alain de Botton
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Work is most fulfilling when you're at the comfortable, exciting edge of not quite knowing what you are doing.
Alain de Botton
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Kant and Hegel are interesting thinkers. But I am happy to insist that they are also terrible writers.
Alain de Botton
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Much of the really serious trouble in the world gets going with a sense of humiliation.
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.
Alain de Botton
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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.
Alain de Botton
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We study biology, physics, movements of glaciers... Where are the classes on envy, feeling wronged, despair, bitterness.
Alain de Botton
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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.
Alain de Botton
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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.
Alain de Botton
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Status anxiety definitely exists at a political level. Many Iraqis were annoyed with the US essentially for reasons of status: for not showing them respect, for humiliating them.
Alain de Botton
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The blunt large questions become connected to smaller, apparently esoteric ones.
Alain de Botton