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We will cease to be angry once we cease to be so hopeful.

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
Hopeful
Cease
Angry

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Anxiety is the handmaiden of contemporary ambition.
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I feel that the great challenge of our time is the communication of ideas.
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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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Cynics are - beneath it all - only idealists with awkwardly high standards.
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We may seek a fortune for no greater reason than to secure the respect and attention of people who would otherwise look straight through us.
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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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If we are inclined to forget how much there is in the world besides that which we anticipate, then works of art are perhaps a little to blame, for in them we find at work the same process of simplification or selection as in the imagination.
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Writing isn’t a career choice. It’s self-medication that over time precipitates the madness it was meant to ward off.
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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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It is in books, poems, paintings which often give us the confidence to take seriously feelings in ourselves that we might otherwise never have thought to acknowledge.
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Let death find us as we are building up our matchstick protests against its waves.
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I went to church and couldn't swallow it. The music was nice but I don't belong there.
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In their different ways, art and philosophy help us, in Schopenhauer's words, to turn pain into knowledge.
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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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Most anger stems from feelings of weakness, sadness and fear: hard to remember when one is at the receiving end of its defiant roar.
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Feeling lost, crazy and desperate belongs to a good life as much as optimism, certainty and reason.
Alain de Botton
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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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Envy: a confused, tangled guide to one's own ambitions.
Alain de Botton
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Reputation matters so much only because people so seldom think for themselves.
Alain de Botton
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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.
Alain de Botton