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True respectability stems not from the will of the majority but from proper reasoning.

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
Respectability
Stem
Reasoning
Proper
Majority
True
Stems

More quotes by Alain de Botton

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I assemble my ideas in pieces on a computer file, then gradually find a place for them on a piece of scaffolding I erect.
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Cynics are - beneath it all - only idealists with awkwardly high standards.
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The more closely we analyze what we consider 'sexy,' the more clearly we will understand that eroticism is the feeling of excitement we experience at finding another human being who shares our values and our sense of the meaning of existence.
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People who readily accept the need for a gym will resist that their personalities might need some work too.
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Writing a book has about it some of the anxiety of telling a joke and having to wait several years to know whether or not it was funny.
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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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...if the beginnings of love and amorous politics are equally rosy, then the ends may be equally bloody.
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The materialistic view of happiness of our age starkly revealed in our understanding of the word luxury.
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Most of what makes a book 'good' is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.
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Our jobs make relentless calls on a narrow band of our faculties, reducing our chances of achieving rounded personalities and leaving us to suspect (often in the gathering darkness of a Sunday evening) that much of who we are, or could be, has gone unexplored.
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The secular world is full of holes. We have secularized badly.
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Most of us still caged within careers chosen for us by our not entirely worldly 18-22 year old selves.
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I was uncomfortable writing fiction. My love was the personal essay rather than the novel.
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If our lives are dominated by a search for happiness, then perhaps few activities reveal as much about the dynamics of this quest - in all its ardour and paradoxes - than our travels.
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The mind may be reluctant to think properly when thinking is all it is supposed to do the task can be as paralysing as having to tell a joke or mimic an accent on demand.
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Most good thinking has its origin in fear.
Alain de Botton
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You have to be quite heavily invested in someone to do them the honour of telling them you're annoyed with them.
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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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Being funny should be an incidental byproduct of trying to get to something truthful, not a destination in itself.
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Booksellers are the most valuable destination for the lonely, given the numbers of books that were written because authors couldn't find anyone to talk to.
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