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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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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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Anxiety is the handmaiden of contemporary ambition.
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The longing for a destiny is no nowhere stronger than in our romantic life. All too often forced to share our bed with those who cannot fathom our soul, can we not be forgiven if we believe ourselves fated to stumble one day upon the man or woman of our dreams.
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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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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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We read the weird tales in newspapers to crowd out the even weirder stuff inside us.
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Happiness may be difficult to obtain. The obstacles are not primarily financial.
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Anyone who isn't embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn't learning enough.
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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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Every realistic picture represents a choice as to which features of reality should be given prominence no painting ever captures the whole.
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Travel agents would be wiser to ask us what we hope to change about our lives rather than simply where we wish to go.
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The activities of drawing, eating and drinking, all involve assimilations by the self of desirable elements from the world, a transfer of goodness from without to within.
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Endeavoring to purchase something we think beautiful may in fact be the most unimaginative way of dealing with the longing it excites in us, just as trying to sleep with someone may be the bluntest response to a feeling of love.
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Art holds out the promise of inner wholeness.
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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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Let death find us as we are building up our matchstick protests against its waves.
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It was no longer her absence that wounded me, but my growing indifference to it. Forgetting, however calming, was also a reminder of infidelity to what I had at one time held so dear.
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The attentions of others matter to us because we are afflicted by a congenital uncertainty as to our own value, as a result of which affliction we tend to allow others' appraisals to play a determining role in how we see ourselves. Our sense of identity is held captive by the judgements of those we live among.
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Though debts are condemned in the financial world, the world of friendship and love may perversely depend on well-managed debts.
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