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Memory is... similar to anticipation: an instrument of simplification and selection.

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
Similar
Instruments
Memory
Memories
Simplification
Anticipation
Selection
Instrument

More quotes by Alain de Botton

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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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People who readily accept the need for a gym will resist that their personalities might need some work too.
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...if the beginnings of love and amorous politics are equally rosy, then the ends may be equally bloody.
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Sweetness is the opposite of machismo, which is everywhere-and I really don't get on with machismo. I'm interested in sensitivity, and weakness, and fear, and anxiety, because I think that, at the end of the day, behind our masks, that's what we are.
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We may not agree with what religions are trying to teach us, but we can admire the institutional way in which they're doing it.
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The architects who benefit us most maybe those generous enough to lay aside their claims to genius in order to devote themselves to assembling graceful but predominantly unoriginal boxes. Architecture should have the confidence and the kindness to be a little boring.
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The price we have paid for expecting to be so much more than our ancestors is a perpetual anxiety that we are far from being all we might be.
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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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There is a longing for a return to a time without the need for choices, free of the regret at the inevitable loss that all choice (however wonderful) has entailed.
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Not everyone is worth listening to.
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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.
Alain de Botton
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We will cease to be angry once we cease to be so hopeful.
Alain de Botton
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Artistic accounts involve severe abbreviations of what reality will force upon us.
Alain de Botton
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Anxiety is the handmaiden of contemporary ambition.
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It should not be Illiers-Combray that we visit: a genuine homage to Proust would be to look at our world through his eyes, not look at his world through our eyes.
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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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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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Mental health: having enough safe places in your mind for your thoughts to settle.
Alain de Botton
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To cut out every negative root would simultaneously mean choking off positive elements that might arise from it further up the stem of the plant. We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them.
Alain de Botton
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We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them.
Alain de Botton