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By travelling across frontiers, on horseback and in the imagination, Montaigne invited us to to exchange local prejudices and the self division they induced for less constraining identities as citizens of the world.

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
Identity
Prejudices
Citizens
Exchange
Constraining
Imagination
Invited
Montaigne
Less
Division
Horseback
Self
Locals
Induced
World
Local
Identities
Prejudice
Travelling
Across
Frontiers

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We study biology, physics, movements of glaciers... Where are the classes on envy, feeling wronged, despair, bitterness.
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What am I supposed to do here? What am I supposed to think?
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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 true nature of bureaucracy may be nowhere more obvious to the observer than in a developing country, for only there will it still be made manifest by the full complement of documents, files, veneered desks and cabinets - which convey the strict and inverse relationship between productivity and paperwork.
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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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The study of maps and the perusal of travel books aroused in me a secret fascination that was at times almost irresistible.
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If one felt successful, there'd be so little incentive to be successful.
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Work is most fulfilling when you're at the comfortable, exciting edge of not quite knowing what you are doing.
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We may not agree with what religions are trying to teach us, but we can admire the institutional way in which they're doing it.
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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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It is not just nature that defies us. Human life is as overwhelming... If we spend time in it [the vast spaces of nature], they may help us to accept more graciously the great, unfathomable events that molest our lives and will inevitably return us to dust.
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At the heart of every frustration lies a basic structure: the collision of a wish with an unyielding reality.
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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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The more dignity is widely and freely available in a society, the less people want to be famous.
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Pick up any newspaper or magazine, open the TV, and you'll be bombarded with suggestions of how to have a successful life. Some of these suggestions are deeply unhelpful to our own projects and priorities - and we should take care.
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We may seek a fortune for no greater reason than to secure the respect and attention of people who would otherwise look straight through us.
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Reputation matters so much only because people so seldom think for themselves.
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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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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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I went to church and couldn't swallow it. The music was nice but I don't belong there.
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