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

More quotes by 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.
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I passionately believe that's it's not just what you say that counts, it's also how you say it - that the success of your argument critically depends on your manner of presenting it.
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It's very hard to respect people on holiday - everybody looks so silly at the beach, it makes you hate humanity - but when you see people at their work they elicit respect, whether it's a mechanic, a stonemason or an accountant.
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We need a home in the psychological sense as much as we need one in the physical: to compensate for a vulnerability. We need a refuge to shore up our states of mind, because so much of the world is opposed to our allegiances. We need our rooms to align us to desirable versions of ourselves and to keep alive the important, evanescent sides of us.
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Work is most fulfilling when you're at the comfortable, exciting edge of not quite knowing what you are doing.
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The degree of sympathy we feel regarding another's fiasco is directly proportional to how easy or difficult it is for us to imagine ourselves, under like circumstances, making a similar mistake.
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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The secular world is full of holes. We have secularized badly.
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Bad architecture is in the end as much a failure of psychology as of design. It is an example expressed through materials of the same tendencies which in other domains will lead us to marry the wrong people, choose inappropriate jobs and book unsuccessful holidays: the tendency not to understand who we are and what will satisfy us.
Alain de Botton
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We are sensitized by the books we read. And the more books we read, and the deeper their lessons sink into us, the more pairs of glasses we have. And those glasses enable us to see things we would have otherwise missed.
Alain de Botton
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True respectability stems not from the will of the majority but from proper reasoning.
Alain de Botton
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Rather than getting more spoilt with age, as difficulties pile up, epiphanies of gratitude abound.
Alain de Botton
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Life gives us no such handy markers - a storm comes, and far from this being a harbinger of death and collapse, during its course a person discovers love and truth, beauty and happiness, the rain lashing at the windows all the while.
Alain de Botton
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At the heart of every frustration lies a basic structure: the collision of a wish with an unyielding reality.
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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A notorious inability to express emotions makes human beings the only animals capable of suicide.
Alain de Botton
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Our disrespect for thinking: someone sitting in a chair, gazing out of a window blankly, always described as 'doing nothing'.
Alain de Botton
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Despite the best efforts of critics and the hopes of authors, our tastes in books are probably as inherent & unbudgeable as those in food.
Alain de Botton
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Only by declaring a book completely finished can one start to see how much remains to be done on it.
Alain de Botton
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The difference between hope and despair is a different way of telling stories from the same facts.
Alain de Botton