Quote

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: 55
Born: 1969
Born: December 20
Journalist
Philosopher
Publisher
Writer
City of Zurich
Alain De Botton
Human
Accepting
Spaces
Humans
Events
Inevitably
Great
Space
Overwhelming
Time
Help
Vast
Life
Lives
Dust
Molest
Helping
Accept
Graciously
Nature
Spend
Defies
May
Return
Unfathomable

More quotes by Alain de Botton

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The dream of the news is that it makes us care about other people and situations. But we cannot identify with people to whom we haven't been introduced. Humans will only respond to art, to people who are skilled in making you care.
Alain de Botton
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Bad art might be defined as a series of bad choices about what to show and what to leave out.
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.
Alain de Botton
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We used to build temples, and museums are about as close as secular society dares to go in facing up to the idea that a good building can change your life (and a bad one ruin it).
Alain de Botton
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There is always the option of being emotionally lazy, that is, of quoting.
Alain de Botton
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One rarely falls in love without being as much attracted to what is interestingly wrong with someone as what is objectively healthy.
Alain de Botton
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The true nature of bureaucracy may be nowhere more obvious to the observer than in a developing country, for only there will it still be made manifest by the full complement of documents, files, veneered desks and cabinets - which convey the strict and inverse relationship between productivity and paperwork.
Alain de Botton
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Because the rhythm of conversation makes no allowance for dead periods, because the presence of others calls for continuous responses, we are left to regret the inanity of what we say, and the missed opportunity of what we do not.
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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So many complaints boil down to the belly ache of the fragile, mortal, ignored ego in a vast and indifferent universe.
Alain de Botton
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Man seems merely dust postponed: the sublime as an encounter - pleasurable, intoxicating, even - with human weakness in the face of strength, age and size of the universe.
Alain de Botton
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There's a whole category of people who miss out by not allowing themselves to be weird enough.
Alain de Botton
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Most victories are, in the best way, acts of revenge.
Alain de Botton
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Dreams reveal we never quite get 'over' anything: it's all still in there somewhere.
Alain de Botton
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Intuition is unconscious accumulated experience informing judgement in real time.
Alain de Botton
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When Proust urges us to evaluate the world properly, he repeatedly reminds us of the value of modest scenes.
Alain de Botton
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Distress at losing an object can be as much a frustration at the intellectual mystery of the disappearance as about the loss itself.
Alain de Botton
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Memory is... similar to anticipation: an instrument of simplification and selection.
Alain de Botton
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Endeavoring to purchase something we think beautiful may in fact be the most unimaginative way of dealing with the longing it excites in us, just as trying to sleep with someone may be the bluntest response to a feeling of love.
Alain de Botton
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The fear of saying something stupid (which stupid people never have) has censored far more good ideas than bad ones.
Alain de Botton