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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: 54
Born: 1969
Born: December 20
Journalist
Philosopher
Publisher
Writer
City of Zurich
Alain De Botton
May
Obtain
Primarily
Obstacles
Financial
Happiness
Difficult

More quotes by Alain de Botton

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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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The fear of saying something stupid (which stupid people never have) has censored far more good ideas than bad ones.
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We should read other people's books in order to learn what we feel it is our own thoughts we should be developing, even if it is another writer's thought that help us to do so.
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It's very hard to respect people on holiday - everybody looks so silly at the beach, it makes you hate humanity - but when you see people at their work they elicit respect, whether it's a mechanic, a stonemason or an accountant.
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Artistic accounts involve severe abbreviations of what reality will force upon us.
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Architects themselves tend to shy away from the word, preferring instead to talk about the manipulation of space.
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The lesson? To respond to the unexpected and hurtful behavior of others with something more than a wipe of the glasses, to see it as a chance to expand our understanding.
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A dominant impulse on encountering beauty is to wish to hold on to it, to possess it and give it weight in one’s life. There is an urge to say, ‘I was here, I saw this and it mattered to me.
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When Proust urges us to evaluate the world properly, he repeatedly reminds us of the value of modest scenes.
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A danger of travel is that we see things at the wrong time, before we have had a chance to build up the necessary receptivity and when new information is therefore as useless and fugitive as necklace beads without a connecting chain.
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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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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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We often lose our tempers not with those who are actually to blame just with those who love us enough to forgive us our foul moods.
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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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There is a longing for a return to a time without the need for choices, free of the regret at the inevitable loss that all choice (however wonderful) has entailed.
Alain de Botton
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Anyone who isn't embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn't learning enough.
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When you look at the Moon, you think, ‘I’m really small. What are my problems?’ It sets things into perspective. We should all look at the Moon a bit more often.
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As victims of hurt, we frequently don't bring up what ails us, because so many wounds look absurd in the light of day.
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The Arab-Israeli conflict is also in many ways a conflict about status: it's a war between two peoples who feel deeply humiliated by the other, who want the other to respect them. Battles over status can be even more intractable than those over land or water or oil.
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How generous was it to offer gifts to people one knew would never accept them?
Alain de Botton