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Arguments are like eels: however logical, they may slip from the minds weak grasp unless fixed there by imagery and style.

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
Unless
Slips
Style
Grasp
May
Logical
Mind
Fixed
Like
Argument
Eels
Minds
Imagery
Weak
Slip
However
Arguments

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How generous was it to offer gifts to people one knew would never accept them?
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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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A notorious inability to express emotions makes human beings the only animals capable of suicide.
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The finest proof of our loyalty toward one another was our monstrous disloyalties towards everyone else.
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Never, ever become a writer. It's a nightmare.
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Pegging your contentment to the overall state of the world rather than of your own life: the basis of morality, or a sort of madness?
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Kant and Hegel are interesting thinkers. But I am happy to insist that they are also terrible writers.
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Our capacity to draw happiness from aesthetic objects or material goods in fact seems critically dependent on our first satisfying a more important range of emotional or psychological needs, among them the need for understanding, for love, expression and respect.
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Forgiveness requires a sense that bad behaviour is a sign of suffering rather than malice.
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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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A danger of travel is that we see things at the wrong time, before we have had a chance to build up the necessary receptivity and when new information is therefore as useless and fugitive as necklace beads without a connecting chain.
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As an atheist, I think there are lots of things religions get up to which are of value to non-believers - and one of those things is trying to be a bit better than we normally manage to be.
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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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The greatest difficulty of Travel is that one is forced to take oneself along.
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Rather than employing it as a supplement to active, conscious seeing, they used the medium as a substitute, paying less attention to the world than they had done previously, taking it on faith that photography automatically assured them possession of it.
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We feel something, and reach out for the nearest phrase or hum with which to communicate, but which fails to do justice to what has induced us to do so....We stay on the outside of our impressions, as if staring at them through a frosted window, superficially related to them, yet estranged from whatever has eluded casual definition.
Alain de Botton
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Art cannot single-handedly create enthusiasm... it merely contributes to enthusiasm and guides us to be more conscious of feelings that we might previously have experienced only tentatively or hurriedly.
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There is a devilishly direct relationship between the significance of an idea and how nervous we become at the prospect of having to think about it.
Alain de Botton
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The problem is if you really believe in a society where those who merit to get to the top, get to the top, you’ll also, by implication … believe in a society where those who deserve to get to the bottom also get to the bottom and stay there.
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We don't really learn anything properly until there is a problem, until we are in pain, until something fails to go as we had hoped ... We suffer, therefore we think.
Alain de Botton