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Happiness may be difficult to obtain. The obstacles are not primarily financial.

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
Obtain
Primarily
Obstacles
Financial
Happiness
Difficult
May

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Though it may feel otherwise, enjoying life is no more dangerous than apprehending it with continuous anxiety and gloom.
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How do the stems connect to the roots?' 'Where is the mist coming from?' 'Why does one tree seem darker than another?' These questions are implicitly asked and answered in the process of sketching.
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It is perhaps when our lives are at their most problematic that we are likely to be most receptive to beautiful things.
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What am I supposed to do here? What am I supposed to think?
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The only people we can think of as normal are those we don't yet know very well.
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Bad art might be defined as a series of bad choices about what to show and what to leave out.
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The finest proof of our loyalty toward one another was our monstrous disloyalties towards everyone else.
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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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In a secularising world, art has replaced religion as a touchstone of our reverence and devotion.
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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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Maturity: the confidence to have no opinions on many things.
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Despite its maddeningly vague, inarticulate form, anxiety is almost always trying to tell you something useful and apposite.
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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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Our minds are susceptible to the influence of external voices telling us what we require to be satisfied, voices that may drown out the faint sounds emitted by our souls and distract us from the careful, arduous task of accurately naming our priorities.
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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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We wanted to test each other's capacity for survival: only if we had tried in vain to destroy one another would we know we were safe.
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Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone - and finding that that's ok with them.
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Wealth is not an absolute. It is relative to desire. Every time we yearn for something we cannot afford, we grow poorer, whatever our resources. And 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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One of our major flaws, and causes of unhappiness, is that we find it hard to take note of appreciate and be grateful for what is always around us. We suffer because we lose sight of the value of what is before us and yearn, often unfairly, for the imagined attraction elsewhere.
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It is no coincidence that the Western attraction to sublime landscapes developed at precisely the moment when traditional beliefs in God began to wane.
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