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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
Powerfully
Drawn
Remarkable
Expensive
Joy
Bring
Cannot
Things

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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 secular world is full of holes. We have secularized badly.
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The greatest difficulty of Travel is that one is forced to take oneself along.
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What kills us isn't one big thing, but thousands of tiny obligations we can't turn down for fear of disappointing others.
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Much of the really serious trouble in the world gets going with a sense of humiliation.
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It's as though either you accept [religious] doctrine and then you can have all the nice stuff, or you reject the doctrine and you're living in some kind of spiritual wasteland under the guidance of CNN and Walmart.
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I was foreign and Jewish, with a funny name, and was very small and hated sport, a real problem at an English prep school. So the way to get round it was to become the school joker, which I did quite effectively - I was always fooling around to make the people who would otherwise dump me in the loo laugh.
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Man seems merely dust postponed: the sublime as an encounter - pleasurable, intoxicating, even - with human weakness in the face of strength, age and size of the universe.
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