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

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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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The media insists on taking what someone didn't mean to say as being far closer to the truth than what they did.
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I was uncomfortable writing fiction. My love was the personal essay rather than the novel.
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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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The fear of saying something stupid (which stupid people never have) has censored far more good ideas than bad ones.
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Envy: a confused, tangled guide to one's own ambitions.
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If one felt successful, there'd be so little incentive to be successful.
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We don't really learn anything properly until there is a problem, until we are in pain, until something fails to go as we had hoped ... We suffer, therefore we think.
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It's hard loving those who don't much like themselves: If you're so great, why would you think I'm so great.
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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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Happiness may be difficult to obtain. The obstacles are not primarily financial.
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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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Everyone wants a better life: very few of us want to be better people.
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The degree of sympathy we feel regarding another's fiasco is directly proportional to how easy or difficult it is for us to imagine ourselves, under like circumstances, making a similar mistake.
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So many complaints boil down to the belly ache of the fragile, mortal, ignored ego in a vast and indifferent universe.
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People who readily accept the need for a gym will resist that their personalities might need some work too.
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A simple problem of arithmetic: there are far more ambitions than there are grand destinies available.
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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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According to Montaigne, it was the oppressive notion that we had complete mental control over our bodies, and the horror of departing from this portrait of normality, that had left the man unable to perform sexually.
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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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