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The greatest works of art speak to us without knowing us.

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
Works
Greatest
Knowing
Speak
Art
Without

More quotes by Alain de Botton

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The arrogance that says analysing the relationship between reasons and causes is more important than writing a philosophy of shyness or sadness or friendship drives me nuts. I can't accept that.
Alain de Botton
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The degree of sympathy we feel regarding another's fiasco is directly proportional to how easy or difficult it is for us to imagine ourselves, under like circumstances, making a similar mistake.
Alain de Botton
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All tours are filled with humiliation. My publisher once hired a private jet to fly me to a venue where 1,000 people were waiting. It almost bankrupted him.
Alain de Botton
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A 'good job' can be both practically attractive while still not good enough to devote your entire life to.
Alain de Botton
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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.
Alain de Botton
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If one felt successful, there'd be so little incentive to be successful.
Alain de Botton
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Cynics are - beneath it all - only idealists with awkwardly high standards.
Alain de Botton
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The dream of the news is that it makes us care about other people and situations. But we cannot identify with people to whom we haven't been introduced. Humans will only respond to art, to people who are skilled in making you care.
Alain de Botton
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In Britain, because I live here, I can also run into problems of envy and competition. But all this is just in a day's work for a writer. You can't put stuff out there without someone calling you a complete fool. Oh, well.
Alain de Botton
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Feeling lost, crazy and desperate belongs to a good life as much as optimism, certainty and reason.
Alain de Botton
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So many complaints boil down to the belly ache of the fragile, mortal, ignored ego in a vast and indifferent universe.
Alain de Botton
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The blunt large questions become connected to smaller, apparently esoteric ones.
Alain de Botton
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How generous was it to offer gifts to people one knew would never accept them?
Alain de Botton
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Curiosity might be pictured as being made up of chains of small questions extending outwards, sometimes over huge distances, from a central hub composed of a few blunt, large questions.
Alain de Botton
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Unhappiness can stem from having only one perspective to play with.
Alain de Botton
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A simple problem of arithmetic: there are far more ambitions than there are grand destinies available.
Alain de Botton
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Insomnia is a glamorous term for thoughts you forgot to have in the day.
Alain de Botton
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Why, then, if expensive things cannot bring us remarkable joy, are we so powerfully drawn to them?
Alain de Botton
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I was foreign and Jewish, with a funny name, and was very small and hated sport, a real problem at an English prep school. So the way to get round it was to become the school joker, which I did quite effectively - I was always fooling around to make the people who would otherwise dump me in the loo laugh.
Alain de Botton
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Rather than saying 'I hate mess', it might draw more compassion to say, 'mess terrifies me as a harbinger of catastrophe'.
Alain de Botton