Quote

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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Alain de Botton
Age: 54
Born: 1969
Born: December 20
Journalist
Philosopher
Publisher
Writer
City of Zurich
Alain De Botton
Exception
Sight
Beauty
Lump
Knowledge
Lumps
Happiness
Implicit
Hints
Rises
Throat

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Alcohol-inspired fights are a reminder of the price we pay for our daily submission at the altars of prudence and order.
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The longing for destiny is nowhere stronger than in our romantic life.
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If our lives are dominated by a search for happiness, then perhaps few activities reveal as much about the dynamics of this quest - in all its ardour and paradoxes - than our travels.
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I am in general a very pessimistic person with an optimistic, day to day take on things. The bare facts of life are utterly terrifying. And yet, one can laugh. Indeed, one has to laugh precisely because of the darkness: the nervous laughter of the trenches.
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One of the better guarantors of ending up in a good relationship: an advanced capacity to be alone.
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All tours are filled with humiliation. My publisher once hired a private jet to fly me to a venue where 1,000 people were waiting. It almost bankrupted him.
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Being content is perhaps no less easy than playing the violin well: and requires no less practice.
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When you look at the Moon, you think, ‘I’m really small. What are my problems?’ It sets things into perspective. We should all look at the Moon a bit more often.
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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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True respectability stems not from the will of the majority but from proper reasoning.
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We keep a special place in our hearts for people who refuse to be impressed by us.
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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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We often lose our tempers not with those who are actually to blame just with those who love us enough to forgive us our foul moods.
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Most anger stems from feelings of weakness, sadness and fear: hard to remember when one is at the receiving end of its defiant roar.
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Year-end financial statements express a truth about office life which is no less irrefutable yet also, in the end, no less irrelevant or irritating than an evolutionary biologist's proud reminder that the purpose of existence lies in the propagation of our genes.
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Pick up any newspaper or magazine, open the TV, and you'll be bombarded with suggestions of how to have a successful life. Some of these suggestions are deeply unhelpful to our own projects and priorities - and we should take care.
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Her lie was symptomatic of a certain pride she took in mocking the romantic, in being unsentimental, matter-of-fact, stoic yet at heart she was the oppo site: idealistic, dreamy, giving, and deeply attached to everything she liked verbally to dismiss as mushy.
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Never too late to learn some embarrassingly basic, stupidly obvious things about oneself.
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Without sex, we would be dangerously invulnerable. We might believe we were not ridiculous. We wouldn't know rejection and humiliation so intimately.
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For paranoia about 'what other people think' : remember that only some hate, a very few love - and almost all just don't care.
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