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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: 54
Born: 1969
Born: December 20
Journalist
Philosopher
Publisher
Writer
City of Zurich
Alain De Botton
Conversation
Wasn
Public
Drunkards
Fanatics
Conversations
Strangers
Stranger
Began

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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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Without sex, we would be dangerously invulnerable. We might believe we were not ridiculous. We wouldn't know rejection and humiliation so intimately.
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For all his understanding of worldly concerns, when it came to fathoming the deeper meaning of his own furious activity, Sir Bob displayed the sort of laziness for which he himself had no patience in others. He appeared to have only a passing interest in the overall purpose of his financial accumulation.
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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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We are sad at home and blame the weather and the ugliness of the buildings, but on the tropical island we learn that the state of the skies and the appearance of our dwellings can never on their own underwrite our joy nor condemn us to misery.
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Forcing people to eat together is an effective way to promote tolerance.
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Work is most fulfilling when you're at the comfortable, exciting edge of not quite knowing what you are doing.
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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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He was marked out by his relentless ability to find fault with others' mediocrity - suggesting that a certain type of intelligence may be at heart nothing more or less than a superior capacity for dissatisfaction.
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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 sad books that best console us when we are sad, and to lonely service stations that we should drive when there is no one for us to hold or love.
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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.
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Intuition is unconscious accumulated experience informing judgement in real time.
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We are sensitized by the books we read. And the more books we read, and the deeper their lessons sink into us, the more pairs of glasses we have. And those glasses enable us to see things we would have otherwise missed.
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Memory is... similar to anticipation: an instrument of simplification and selection.
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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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We study biology, physics, movements of glaciers... Where are the classes on envy, feeling wronged, despair, bitterness.
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The media insists on taking what someone didn't mean to say as being far closer to the truth than what they did.
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In a secularising world, art has replaced religion as a touchstone of our reverence and devotion.
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Paying tax should be framed as a glorious civic duty worthy of gratitude - not a punishment for making money.
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