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It is striking how much more seriously we are likely to be taken after we have been dead a few centuries.

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
Much
Striking
Centuries
Seriously
Likely
Dead
Century
Taken

More quotes by Alain de Botton

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There may be significant things to learn about people by looking at what annoys them most.
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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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It is in books, poems, paintings which often give us the confidence to take seriously feelings in ourselves that we might otherwise never have thought to acknowledge.
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Though debts are condemned in the financial world, the world of friendship and love may perversely depend on well-managed debts.
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Most of us still caged within careers chosen for us by our not entirely worldly 18-22 year old selves.
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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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Never, ever become a writer. It's a nightmare.
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The longing for destiny is nowhere stronger than in our romantic life.
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There is a devilishly direct relationship between the significance of an idea and how nervous we become at the prospect of having to think about it.
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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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How generous was it to offer gifts to people one knew would never accept them?
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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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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.
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The more familiar two people become, the more the language they speak together departs from that of the ordinary, dictionary-defined discourse. Familiarity creates a new language, an in-house language of intimacy that carries reference to the story the two lovers are weaving together and that cannot be readily understood by others.
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To be shown love is to feel ourselves the object of concern: our presence is noted, our name is registered, our views are listened to, our failings are treated with indulgence and our needs are ministered to. And under such care, we flourish.
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Reputation matters so much only because people so seldom think for themselves.
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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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After 40 (old age for most of man's history), one should strive to be more or less packed and ready to go were the end call to come.
Alain de Botton
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Those who divorce aren't necessarily the most unhappy, just those neatly able to believe their misery is caused by one other person.
Alain de Botton
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Only as we mature does affection begin to depend on achievement.
Alain de Botton