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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
Daily
Reminder
Inspired
Altars
Pay
Reminders
Fighting
Submission
Order
Fights
Prudence
Alcohol
Price

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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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My writing always came out of a very personal place, out of an attempt to stay sane.
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Her lie was symptomatic of a certain pride she took in mocking the romantic, in being unsentimental, matter-of-fact, stoic yet at heart she was the oppo site: idealistic, dreamy, giving, and deeply attached to everything she liked verbally to dismiss as mushy.
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Let death find us as we are building up our matchstick protests against its waves.
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Memory is... similar to anticipation: an instrument of simplification and selection.
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The activities of drawing, eating and drinking, all involve assimilations by the self of desirable elements from the world, a transfer of goodness from without to within.
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The only way to be happy is to realise how much depends on how you look at things
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One of love's greatest drawbacks is that, for a while at least, it is in danger of making us happy.
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True respectability stems not from the will of the majority but from proper reasoning.
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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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Everyone returns us to a different sense of ourselves, for we become a little of who they think we are.
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Status anxiety definitely exists at a political level. Many Iraqis were annoyed with the US essentially for reasons of status: for not showing them respect, for humiliating them.
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In a secularising world, art has replaced religion as a touchstone of our reverence and devotion.
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Most victories are, in the best way, acts of revenge.
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Mental health: having enough safe places in your mind for your thoughts to settle.
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Travel agents would be wiser to ask us what we hope to change about our lives rather than simply where we wish to go.
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Bad architecture is in the end as much a failure of psychology as of design. It is an example expressed through materials of the same tendencies which in other domains will lead us to marry the wrong people, choose inappropriate jobs and book unsuccessful holidays: the tendency not to understand who we are and what will satisfy us.
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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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Anxiety is the handmaiden of contemporary ambition.
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Year-end financial statements express a truth about office life which is no less irrefutable yet also, in the end, no less irrelevant or irritating than an evolutionary biologist's proud reminder that the purpose of existence lies in the propagation of our genes.
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