Quote

The mind may be reluctant to think properly when thinking is all it is supposed to do the task can be as paralysing as having to tell a joke or mimic an accent on demand.

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
Mind
Joke
Think
Task
Thinking
Tasks
Paralysing
Jokes
Mimic
Supposed
Reluctant
Demand
Accent
Tell
Accents
May
Properly

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Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone - and finding that that's ok with them.
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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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Distress at losing an object can be as much a frustration at the intellectual mystery of the disappearance as about the loss itself.
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One of the best protections against disappointment is to have a lot going on.
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People who go on to be writers are those who can forgive themselves the horror of the first draft.
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The fear of saying something stupid (which stupid people never have) has censored far more good ideas than bad ones.
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Those who divorce aren't necessarily the most unhappy, just those neatly able to believe their misery is caused by one other person.
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We feel something, and reach out for the nearest phrase or hum with which to communicate, but which fails to do justice to what has induced us to do so....We stay on the outside of our impressions, as if staring at them through a frosted window, superficially related to them, yet estranged from whatever has eluded casual definition.
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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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These inventors were elevating the formulation of entrepreneurial ideas to the status of a visionary activity. Though forced to justify their efforts in the pragmatic language of venture capital, they were at heart utopian thinkers intent on transforming the world.
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In their different ways, art and philosophy help us, in Schopenhauer's words, to turn pain into knowledge.
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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.
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At the heart of every frustration lies a basic structure: the collision of a wish with an unyielding reality.
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The real issue is not whether baking biscuits is meaningful, but the extent to which the activity can seem to be so after it has been continuously stretched and subdivided across five thousand lives.
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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 company of certain people may excite our generosity and sensitivity, while that of others awakens our competitiveness and envy.
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When work is not going well, it's useful to remember that our identities stretch beyond what is on the business card, that we were people long before we became workers - and will continue to be human once we have put our tools down forever.
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Our jobs make relentless calls on a narrow band of our faculties, reducing our chances of achieving rounded personalities and leaving us to suspect (often in the gathering darkness of a Sunday evening) that much of who we are, or could be, has gone unexplored.
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We are presented with an unpleasant choice between either committing to peculiar concepts about immaterial deities or letting go entirely of a host of consoling, subtle or just charming rituals for which we struggle to find equivalents in secular society.
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Our homes do not have to offer us permanent occupancy or store our clothes to merit the name. To speak of home in relation to a building is simply to recognise its harmony with our own prized internal song. Home can be an airport or a library, a garden or a motorway diner.
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