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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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Alain de Botton
Age: 55
Born: 1969
Born: December 20
Journalist
Philosopher
Publisher
Writer
City of Zurich
Alain De Botton
Bring
Cannot
Things
Powerfully
Drawn
Remarkable
Expensive
Joy

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Feeling lost, crazy and desperate belongs to a good life as much as optimism, certainty and reason.
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The difference between hope and despair is a different way of telling stories from the same facts.
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Rather than getting more spoilt with age, as difficulties pile up, epiphanies of gratitude abound.
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Everyone returns us to a different sense of ourselves, for we become a little of who they think we are.
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Most of what makes a book 'good' is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.
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One kind of good book should leave you asking: how did the author know that about me?
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Insomnia is a glamorous term for thoughts you forgot to have in the day.
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We accept the need to train extensively to fly a plane but think instinct should be enough for marrying and raising kids.
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Taking architecture seriously therefore makes some singular and strenuous demands upon us...It means conceding that we are inconveniently vulnerable to the colour of our wallpaper and that our sense of purpose may be derailed by an unfortunate bedspread
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Serious journalists often imagine society is adrift because people don't know certain things. Yet often, they know but just don't care. So the task of serious journalism isn't just to lay out truths. It is to make vital truths compelling to a big audience.
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Rather than employing it as a supplement to active, conscious seeing, they used the medium as a substitute, paying less attention to the world than they had done previously, taking it on faith that photography automatically assured them possession of it.
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The dream of the news is that it makes us care about other people and situations. But we cannot identify with people to whom we haven't been introduced. Humans will only respond to art, to people who are skilled in making you care.
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Once I began to consider everything as being of potential interest, objects released latent layers of value.
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what we call a home is merely any place that succeeds in making more consistenly available to us the important truths which the wider world ignores, or which our distracted and irresolute selves have trouble holding onto. (p123) Architecture of Happiness
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Everyone wants a better life: very few of us want to be better people.
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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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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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