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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
Century
Taken
Much
Striking
Centuries
Seriously
Likely
Dead
More quotes by Alain de Botton
Our sense of what is valuable will hence be radically distorted if we must perpetually condemn as tedious everything we lack, simply because we lack it.
Alain de Botton
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.
Alain de Botton
I assemble my ideas in pieces on a computer file, then gradually find a place for them on a piece of scaffolding I erect.
Alain de Botton
I passionately believe that's it's not just what you say that counts, it's also how you say it - that the success of your argument critically depends on your manner of presenting it.
Alain de Botton
The only people we can think of as normal are those we don't yet know very well.
Alain de Botton
We don't really learn anything properly until there is a problem, until we are in pain, until something fails to go as we had hoped ... We suffer, therefore we think.
Alain de Botton
We wanted to test each other's capacity for survival: only if we had tried in vain to destroy one another would we know we were safe.
Alain de Botton
There is always the option of being emotionally lazy, that is, of quoting.
Alain de Botton
Alcohol-inspired fights are a reminder of the price we pay for our daily submission at the altars of prudence and order.
Alain de Botton
Curiosity takes ignorance seriously - and is confident enough to admit when it's in the dark. It is aware of not knowing. And then it sets out to do something about it.
Alain de Botton
It should not be Illiers-Combray that we visit: a genuine homage to Proust would be to look at our world through his eyes, not look at his world through our eyes.
Alain de Botton
If one felt successful, there'd be so little incentive to be successful.
Alain de Botton
Although I don't believe in God, Bach's music shows me what a love of God must feel like.
Alain de Botton
Out of the millions of people we live among, most of whom we habitually ignore and are ignored by in turn, there are always a few that hold hostage our capacity for happiness, whom we could recognize by their smell alone and whom we would rather die than be without.
Alain de Botton
Despite the best efforts of critics and the hopes of authors, our tastes in books are probably as inherent & unbudgeable as those in food.
Alain de Botton
The universe is large and we are tiny, without the need for further religious superstructure. One can have so-called spiritual moments without belief in the spirit.
Alain de Botton
Man seems merely dust postponed: the sublime as an encounter - pleasurable, intoxicating, even - with human weakness in the face of strength, age and size of the universe.
Alain de Botton
Maturity: knowing where you're crazy, trying to warn others of the fact and striving to keep yourself under control.
Alain de Botton
It is by finding out what something is not that one comes closest to understanding what it is.
Alain de Botton
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.
Alain de Botton
