Quote

It would scarcely be acceptable, for example, to ask in the course of an ordinary conversation what our society holds to be the purpose of work.

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
Asks
Scarcely
Society
Acceptable
Purpose
Holds
Work
Conversation
Would
Ordinary
Example
Courses
Course

More quotes by Alain de Botton

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Don't despair: despair suggests you are in total control and know what is coming. You don't - surrender to events with hope.
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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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Most of our childhood is stored not in photos, but in certain biscuits, lights of day, smells, textures of carpet.
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Artistic accounts involve severe abbreviations of what reality will force upon us.
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You have to be quite heavily invested in someone to do them the honour of telling them you're annoyed with them.
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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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What am I supposed to do here? What am I supposed to think?
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I was uncomfortable writing fiction. My love was the personal essay rather than the novel.
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The materialistic view of happiness of our age starkly revealed in our understanding of the word luxury.
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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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I thought about societies where exceptional fortunes are built up in industries with very little connection to out sincere and significant needs, industries where it is difficult to escape from the disparity between a seriousness of means and a triviality of ends.
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Must being in love always mean being in pain?
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He did not mean to depress us, rather to free us from expectations which inspire bitterness. It is consoling, when love has let us down, to hear that happiness was never part of the plan.
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It is striking how much more seriously we are likely to be taken after we have been dead a few centuries.
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The true nature of bureaucracy may be nowhere more obvious to the observer than in a developing country, for only there will it still be made manifest by the full complement of documents, files, veneered desks and cabinets - which convey the strict and inverse relationship between productivity and paperwork.
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We wanted to test each other's capacity for survival: only if we had tried in vain to destroy one another would we know we were safe.
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Rather than saying 'I hate mess', it might draw more compassion to say, 'mess terrifies me as a harbinger of catastrophe'.
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The fear of saying something stupid (which stupid people never have) has censored far more good ideas than bad ones.
Alain de Botton
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Good books put a finger on emotions that are deeply our own - but that we could never have described on our own.
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Intuition is unconscious accumulated experience informing judgement in real time.
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