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The blunt large questions become connected to smaller, apparently esoteric ones.

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
Connected
Questions
Large
Ones
Become
Esoteric
Blunt
Apparently
Smaller

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Forcing people to eat together is an effective way to promote tolerance.
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The only way to be happy is to realise how much depends on how you look at things
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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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Feeling lost, crazy and desperate belongs to a good life as much as optimism, certainty and reason.
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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.
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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.
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Do you love me enough that I may be weak with you? Everyone loves strength, but do you love me for my weakness? That is the real test.
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A dominant impulse on encountering beauty is to wish to hold on to it, to possess it and give it weight in one’s life. There is an urge to say, ‘I was here, I saw this and it mattered to me.
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Our capacity to draw happiness from aesthetic objects or material goods in fact seems critically dependent on our first satisfying a more important range of emotional or psychological needs, among them the need for understanding, for love, expression and respect.
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There are selections so acute that they come to define a place, with the result that we can no longer travel through that landscape without being reminded of what a great artist noticed there.
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Mental health: having enough safe places in your mind for your thoughts to settle.
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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.
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The arrogance that says analysing the relationship between reasons and causes is more important than writing a philosophy of shyness or sadness or friendship drives me nuts. I can't accept that.
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Rather than saying 'I hate mess', it might draw more compassion to say, 'mess terrifies me as a harbinger of catastrophe'.
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I think people want to get married to end their emotional uncertainty. In a way, they want to end powerful feelings, or certainly the negative ones.
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I know a lot about writing, but I don't know much about how other industries work. I've tried to use my naivety to my advantage.
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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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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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I went to church and couldn't swallow it. The music was nice but I don't belong there.
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Intuition is unconscious accumulated experience informing judgement in real time.
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