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Man seems merely dust postponed: the sublime as an encounter - pleasurable, intoxicating, even - with human weakness in the face of strength, age and size of the universe.

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
Faces
Encounters
Universe
Dust
Seems
Size
Human
Merely
Postponed
Humans
Weakness
Intoxicating
Even
Strength
Pleasurable
Men
Face
Encounter
Age
Sublime

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A virtuous, ordinary life, striving for wisdom but never far from folly, is achievement enough.
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The desire for high status is never stronger than in situations where ordinary life fails to answer a median need for dignity and comfort.
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Though debts are condemned in the financial world, the world of friendship and love may perversely depend on well-managed debts.
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as the determinants of high status keep shifting, so, too, naturally, will the triggers of status anxiety be altered.
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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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Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone - and finding that that's ok with them.
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Travel agents would be wiser to ask us what we hope to change about our lives rather than simply where we wish to go.
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The attentions of others matter to us because we are afflicted by a congenital uncertainty as to our own value, as a result of which affliction we tend to allow others' appraisals to play a determining role in how we see ourselves. Our sense of identity is held captive by the judgements of those we live among.
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What we find exotic abroad may be what we hunger for in vain at home.
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Our minds are susceptible to the influence of external voices telling us what we require to be satisfied, voices that may drown out the faint sounds emitted by our souls and distract us from the careful, arduous task of accurately naming our priorities.
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Being funny should be an incidental byproduct of trying to get to something truthful, not a destination in itself.
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For all his understanding of worldly concerns, when it came to fathoming the deeper meaning of his own furious activity, Sir Bob displayed the sort of laziness for which he himself had no patience in others. He appeared to have only a passing interest in the overall purpose of his financial accumulation.
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Religions are so subtle, so complicated, so intelligent in many ways that they're not fit to be abandoned to the religious alone they're for all of us.
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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.
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As we write, so we build: to keep a record of what matters to us.
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One kind of good book should leave you asking: how did the author know that about me?
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We should read other people's books in order to learn what we feel it is our own thoughts we should be developing, even if it is another writer's thought that help us to do so.
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What we seek, at the deepest level, is inwardly to resemble, rather than physically to possess, the objects and places that touch us through their beauty.
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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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Every realistic picture represents a choice as to which features of reality should be given prominence no painting ever captures the whole.
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