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Our greatest furies spring from events which violate our sense of the ground of our existence.

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
Sense
Furies
Violate
Fury
Ground
Spring
Events
Greatest
Existence

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I assemble my ideas in pieces on a computer file, then gradually find a place for them on a piece of scaffolding I erect.
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There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life.
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Forgiveness requires a sense that bad behaviour is a sign of suffering rather than malice.
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There are selections so acute that they come to define a place, with the result that we can no longer travel through that landscape without being reminded of what a great artist noticed there.
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Everyone wants a better life: very few of us want to be better people.
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Taking photographs can assuage the itch for possession sparked by the beauty of a place our anxiety over losing a precious scene can decline with every click of the shutter.
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Happiness is impossible for longer than 15 minutes. We are the descendants of creatures who, above all else, worried.
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We need a home in the psychological sense as much as we need one in the physical: to compensate for a vulnerability. We need a refuge to shore up our states of mind, because so much of the world is opposed to our allegiances. We need our rooms to align us to desirable versions of ourselves and to keep alive the important, evanescent sides of us.
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We each appear to hold within ourselves a range of divergent views as to our native qualities.. And amid such uncertainty, we typically turn to the wider world to settle the question of our significance.. we seem beholden to affections of others to endure ourselves.
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Our responses to the world are crucially moulded by the company we keep, for we temper our curiosity to fit in with the expectations of others.
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Politics is so difficult, it's generally only people who aren't quite up to the task who feel convinced they are.
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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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Let's say you went to Harvard or Oxford or Cambridge, and you said, 'I've come here because I'm in search of morality, guidance and consolation I want to know how to live,' - they would show you the way to the insane asylum.
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I know a lot about writing, but I don't know much about how other industries work. I've tried to use my naivety to my advantage.
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To one's enemies: I hate myself more than you ever could.
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The mind does most of its best thinking when we aren't there. The answers are there in the morning.
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According to Montaigne, it was the oppressive notion that we had complete mental control over our bodies, and the horror of departing from this portrait of normality, that had left the man unable to perform sexually.
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