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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
Violate
Fury
Ground
Spring
Events
Greatest
Existence
Sense
Furies

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Writing a book has about it some of the anxiety of telling a joke and having to wait several years to know whether or not it was funny.
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We envy only those whom we feel ourselves to be like we envy only members of our reference group. There are few successes more unendurable than those of our close friends.
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What is fascinating about marriage is why anyone wants to get married.
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It's clear to me that there is no good reason for many philosophy books to sound as complicated as they do.
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It wasn't only fanatics and drunkards who began conversations with strangers in public.
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Taking architecture seriously therefore makes some singular and strenuous demands upon us...It means conceding that we are inconveniently vulnerable to the colour of our wallpaper and that our sense of purpose may be derailed by an unfortunate bedspread
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The only way to be happy is to realise how much depends on how you look at things
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Paying tax should be framed as a glorious civic duty worthy of gratitude - not a punishment for making money.
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Choosing a spouse and a choosing career: the two great decisions for which society refuses to set up institutional guidance.
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Our jobs make relentless calls on a narrow band of our faculties, reducing our chances of achieving rounded personalities and leaving us to suspect (often in the gathering darkness of a Sunday evening) that much of who we are, or could be, has gone unexplored.
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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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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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One's doing well if age improves even slightly one's capacity to hold on to that vital truism: This too shall pass.
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Literature deserves its prestige for one reason above all others - because it's a tool to help us live and die with a little bit more wisdom, goodness, and sanity.
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One of the best protections against disappointment is to have a lot going on.
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Only as we mature does affection begin to depend on achievement.
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Most victories are, in the best way, acts of revenge.
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Being content is perhaps no less easy than playing the violin well: and requires no less practice.
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There's a whole category of people who miss out by not allowing themselves to be weird enough.
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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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