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: 55
Born: 1969
Born: December 20
Journalist
Philosopher
Publisher
Writer
City of Zurich
Alain De Botton
Happiness
Implicit
Hints
Rises
Throat
Exception
Sight
Beauty
Lump
Knowledge
Lumps

More quotes by Alain de Botton

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Happiness may be difficult to obtain. The obstacles are not primarily financial.
Alain de Botton
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You normally have to be bashed about a bit by life to see the point of daffodils, sunsets and uneventful nice days.
Alain de Botton
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To cut out every negative root would simultaneously mean choking off positive elements that might arise from it further up the stem of the plant. We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them.
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The challenge for a human now is to be more interesting to another than his or her smartphone.
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I learnt to stop fantasising about the perfect job or the perfect relationship because that can actually be an excuse for not living.
Alain de Botton
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There's a whole category of people who miss out by not allowing themselves to be weird enough.
Alain de Botton
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Gaffe-focused journalism: revenge of intelligent people who know true evils are out there but lack the access/time to get to them.
Alain de Botton
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There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life.
Alain de Botton
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Unhappiness can stem from having only one perspective to play with.
Alain de Botton
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Forgiveness requires a sense that bad behaviour is a sign of suffering rather than malice.
Alain de Botton
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In their different ways, art and philosophy help us, in Schopenhauer's words, to turn pain into knowledge.
Alain de Botton
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Our disrespect for thinking: someone sitting in a chair, gazing out of a window blankly, always described as 'doing nothing'.
Alain de Botton
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Being content is perhaps no less easy than playing the violin well: and requires no less practice.
Alain de Botton
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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.
Alain de Botton
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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.
Alain de Botton
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Wealth is not an absolute. It is relative to desire. Every time we yearn for something we cannot afford, we grow poorer, whatever our resources. And 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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Without sex, we would be dangerously invulnerable. We might believe we were not ridiculous. We wouldn't know rejection and humiliation so intimately.
Alain de Botton
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Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone - and finding that that's ok with them.
Alain de Botton
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Why, then, if expensive things cannot bring us remarkable joy, are we so powerfully drawn to them?
Alain de Botton
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It's perhaps easier now than ever before to make a good living it's perhaps harder than ever before to stay calm, to be free of career anxiety.
Alain de Botton