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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

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Alain de Botton
Age: 54
Born: 1969
Born: December 20
Journalist
Philosopher
Publisher
Writer
City of Zurich
Alain De Botton
Inspired
Altars
Pay
Reminders
Fighting
Submission
Order
Fights
Prudence
Alcohol
Price
Daily
Reminder

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A 'good job' can be both practically attractive while still not good enough to devote your entire life to.
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Rather than employing it as a supplement to active, conscious seeing, they used the medium as a substitute, paying less attention to the world than they had done previously, taking it on faith that photography automatically assured them possession of it.
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There is real danger of a disconnect between what's on your business card and who you are deep inside, and it's not a disconnect that the world is ready to be patient with.
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Happiness may be difficult to obtain. The obstacles are not primarily financial.
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Happiness is impossible for longer than 15 minutes. We are the descendants of creatures who, above all else, worried.
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The best cure for one's bad tendencies is to see them in action in another person.
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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.
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The fear of saying something stupid (which stupid people never have) has censored far more good ideas than bad ones.
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These inventors were elevating the formulation of entrepreneurial ideas to the status of a visionary activity. Though forced to justify their efforts in the pragmatic language of venture capital, they were at heart utopian thinkers intent on transforming the world.
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Religions are so subtle, so complicated, so intelligent in many ways that they're not fit to be abandoned to the religious alone they're for all of us.
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We need a home in the psychological sense as much as we need one in the physical: to compensate for a vulnerability. We need a refuge to shore up our states of mind, because so much of the world is opposed to our allegiances. We need our rooms to align us to desirable versions of ourselves and to keep alive the important, evanescent sides of us.
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Must being in love always mean being in pain?
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Anyone who isn't embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn't learning enough.
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Our capacity to draw happiness from aesthetic objects or material goods in fact seems critically dependent on our first satisfying a more important range of emotional or psychological needs, among them the need for understanding, for love, expression and respect.
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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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Memory is... similar to anticipation: an instrument of simplification and selection.
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Life gives us no such handy markers - a storm comes, and far from this being a harbinger of death and collapse, during its course a person discovers love and truth, beauty and happiness, the rain lashing at the windows all the while.
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I know a lot about writing, but I don't know much about how other industries work. I've tried to use my naivety to my advantage.
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The lesson? To respond to the unexpected and hurtful behavior of others with something more than a wipe of the glasses, to see it as a chance to expand our understanding.
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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.
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