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Rather than employing it as a supplement to active, conscious seeing, they used the medium as a substitute, paying less attention to the world than they had done previously, taking it on faith that photography automatically assured them possession of it.

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
World
Taking
Substitutes
Seeing
Medium
Supplement
Attention
Mediums
Supplements
Rather
Paying
Employing
Less
Possession
Previously
Faith
Active
Automatically
Used
Photography
Substitute
Done
Conscious
Assured

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Though it may feel otherwise, enjoying life is no more dangerous than apprehending it with continuous anxiety and gloom.
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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.
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The difference between hope and despair is a different way of telling stories from the same facts.
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There is always the option of being emotionally lazy, that is, of quoting.
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It is not necessarily at home that we best encounter our true selves. The furniture insists that we cannot change because it does not the domestic setting keeps us tethered to the person we are in ordinary life, who may not be who we essentially are.
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I thought about societies where exceptional fortunes are built up in industries with very little connection to out sincere and significant needs, industries where it is difficult to escape from the disparity between a seriousness of means and a triviality of ends.
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The challenge of modern relationships: how to prove more interesting than the other's smartphone.
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Feeling lost, crazy and desperate belongs to a good life as much as optimism, certainty and reason.
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Most anger stems from feelings of weakness, sadness and fear: hard to remember when one is at the receiving end of its defiant roar.
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We don't really learn anything properly until there is a problem, until we are in pain, until something fails to go as we had hoped ... We suffer, therefore we think.
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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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It wasn't only fanatics and drunkards who began conversations with strangers in public.
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I feel that the great challenge of our time is the communication of ideas.
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Bitterness: anger that forgot where it came from.
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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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What should worry us is not the number of people that oppose us, but how good their reasons are for doing so.
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If we are inclined to forget how much there is in the world besides that which we anticipate, then works of art are perhaps a little to blame, for in them we find at work the same process of simplification or selection as in the imagination.
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The lesson? To respond to the unexpected and hurtful behavior of others with something more than a wipe of the glasses, to see it as a chance to expand our understanding.
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Rage is caused by a conviction, almost comic in its optimistic origins (however tragic in its effects), that a given frustration has not been written into the contract of life.
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