Quote

A great writer picks up on those things that matter. It’s almost like their radar is attuned to the most significant moments.

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
Moments
Matter
Great
Attuned
Things
Radar
Like
Picks
Significant
Writer
Almost

More quotes by Alain de Botton

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We should not be frightened by appearances.
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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As we write, so we build: to keep a record of what matters to us.
Alain de Botton
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People only get really interesting when they start to rattle the bars of their cages.
Alain de Botton
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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.
Alain de Botton
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Work finally begins when the fear of doing nothing exceeds the fear of doing it badly.
Alain de Botton
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Memory is... similar to anticipation: an instrument of simplification and selection.
Alain de Botton
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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.
Alain de Botton
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Insomnia is a glamorous term for thoughts you forgot to have in the day.
Alain de Botton
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Happiness is impossible for longer than 15 minutes. We are the descendants of creatures who, above all else, worried.
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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True respectability stems not from the will of the majority but from proper reasoning.
Alain de Botton
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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.
Alain de Botton
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Every time we feel satisfied with what we have, we can be counted as rich, however little we may actually possess.
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.
Alain de Botton
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The problem isn't so much finding good ideas (there is no shortage) as embedding the ones we have into everyday practice.
Alain de Botton
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A lump rises in our throat at the sight of beauty from an implicit knowledge that the happiness it hints at is the exception.
Alain de Botton
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In the works of Lucretius, we find two reasons why we shouldn't worry about death. If you have had a successful life, Lucretius tell us, there's no reason to mind its end. And, if you haven't had a good time, Why do you seek to add more years, which would also pass but ill?
Alain de Botton
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Politics is so difficult, it's generally only people who aren't quite up to the task who feel convinced they are.
Alain de Botton
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The good parent: someone who doesn't mind, for a time, being hated by their children.
Alain de Botton