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It wasn't only fanatics and drunkards who began conversations with strangers in public.

Alain de Botton

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Alain de Botton
Age: 55
Born: 1969
Born: December 20
Journalist
Philosopher
Publisher
Writer
City of Zurich
Alain De Botton
Fanatics
Conversations
Strangers
Stranger
Began
Conversation
Wasn
Public
Drunkards

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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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One kind of good book should leave you asking: how did the author know that about me?
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We are continuously challenged to discover new works of culture—and, in the process, we don’t allow any one of them to assume a weight in our minds.
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It is in dialogue with pain that many beautiful things acquire their value. Acquaintance with grief turns out to be one of the more unusual prerequisites of architectural appreciation. We might, quite aside from all other requirements, need to be a little sad before buildings can properly touch us.
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As we write, so we build: to keep a record of what matters to us.
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Much of the really serious trouble in the world gets going with a sense of humiliation.
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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.
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The only possible way to begin a book is to tell oneself that its eventual failure is guaranteed — but survivable.
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People who go on to be writers are those who can forgive themselves the horror of the first draft.
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A notorious inability to express emotions makes human beings the only animals capable of suicide.
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What kills us isn't one big thing, but thousands of tiny obligations we can't turn down for fear of disappointing others.
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One of our major flaws, and causes of unhappiness, is that we find it hard to take note of appreciate and be grateful for what is always around us. We suffer because we lose sight of the value of what is before us and yearn, often unfairly, for the imagined attraction elsewhere.
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We envy only those whom we feel ourselves to be like we envy only members of our reference group. There are few successes more unendurable than those of our close friends.
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I think people want to get married to end their emotional uncertainty. In a way, they want to end powerful feelings, or certainly the negative ones.
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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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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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It is perhaps when our lives are at their most problematic that we are likely to be most receptive to beautiful things.
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The greatest works of art speak to us without knowing us.
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There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life.
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When work is not going well, it's useful to remember that our identities stretch beyond what is on the business card, that we were people long before we became workers - and will continue to be human once we have put our tools down forever.
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