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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: 54
Born: 1969
Born: December 20
Journalist
Philosopher
Publisher
Writer
City of Zurich
Alain De Botton
Joy
Bring
Cannot
Things
Powerfully
Drawn
Remarkable
Expensive

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What should worry us is not the number of people that oppose us, but how good their reasons are for doing so.
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As we write, so we build: to keep a record of what matters to us.
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When work is not going well, it's useful to remember that our identities stretch beyond what is on the business card, that we were people long before we became workers - and will continue to be human once we have put our tools down forever.
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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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Every time we feel satisfied with what we have, we can be counted as rich, however little we may actually possess.
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I think people want to get married to end their emotional uncertainty. In a way, they want to end powerful feelings, or certainly the negative ones.
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We used to build temples, and museums are about as close as secular society dares to go in facing up to the idea that a good building can change your life (and a bad one ruin it).
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Reputation matters so much only because people so seldom think for themselves.
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Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than moving planes, ships or trains.
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Newspapers are being read all around. The point is not, of course, to glean new information, but rather to coax the mind out of its sleep-induced introspective temper.
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The pleasure we derive from journeys is perhaps dependent more on the mindset with which we travel than on the destination we travel to.
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If we are inclined to forget how much there is in the world besides that which we anticipate, then works of art are perhaps a little to blame, for in them we find at work the same process of simplification or selection as in the imagination.
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Writing isn’t a career choice. It’s self-medication that over time precipitates the madness it was meant to ward off.
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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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A great writer picks up on those things that matter. It’s almost like their radar is attuned to the most significant moments.
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We are presented with an unpleasant choice between either committing to peculiar concepts about immaterial deities or letting go entirely of a host of consoling, subtle or just charming rituals for which we struggle to find equivalents in secular society.
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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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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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Being funny should be an incidental byproduct of trying to get to something truthful, not a destination in itself.
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