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Newspapers are being read all around. The point is not, of course, to glean new information, but rather to coax the mind out of its sleep-induced introspective temper.

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
Around
Newspapers
Mind
Information
Courses
Course
Glean
Sleep
Coax
Point
Induced
Rather
Introspective
Read
Temper

More quotes by Alain de Botton

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A good half of the art of living is resilience.
Alain de Botton
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Memory is... similar to anticipation: an instrument of simplification and selection.
Alain de Botton
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It's hard loving those who don't much like themselves: If you're so great, why would you think I'm so great.
Alain de Botton
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If it is true that love is the pursuit in another of qualities we lack in ourselves, then in our love of someone from another culture, one ambition may be to weld ourselves more closely to values missing from our own culture.
Alain de Botton
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In the works of Lucretius, we find two reasons why we shouldn't worry about death. If you have had a successful life, Lucretius tell us, there's no reason to mind its end. And, if you haven't had a good time, Why do you seek to add more years, which would also pass but ill?
Alain de Botton
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Not being understood may be taken as a sign that there is much in one to understand.
Alain de Botton
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Our bodies hold our minds hostage to their whims and rhythms.
Alain de Botton
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A simple problem of arithmetic: there are far more ambitions than there are grand destinies available.
Alain de Botton
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It is not necessarily at home that we best encounter our true selves. The furniture insists that we cannot change because it does not the domestic setting keeps us tethered to the person we are in ordinary life, who may not be who we essentially are.
Alain de Botton
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The moment we cry in a film is not when things are sad but when they turn out to be more beautiful than we expected them to be.
Alain de Botton
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You normally have to be bashed about a bit by life to see the point of daffodils, sunsets and uneventful nice days.
Alain de Botton
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Unnatural to expect that learning to be happy should be any easier than, say, learning to play the violin or require any less practice.
Alain de Botton
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As adults, we try to develop the character traits that would have rescued our parents.
Alain de Botton
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We are certainly influenced by role models, and if we are surrounded by images of beautiful rich people, we will start to think that to be beautiful and rich is very important - just as in the Middle Ages, people were surrounded by images of religious piety.
Alain de Botton
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Rage is caused by a conviction, almost comic in its optimistic origins (however tragic in its effects), that a given frustration has not been written into the contract of life.
Alain de Botton
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The Arab-Israeli conflict is also in many ways a conflict about status: it's a war between two peoples who feel deeply humiliated by the other, who want the other to respect them. Battles over status can be even more intractable than those over land or water or oil.
Alain de Botton
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According to Montaigne, it was the oppressive notion that we had complete mental control over our bodies, and the horror of departing from this portrait of normality, that had left the man unable to perform sexually.
Alain de Botton
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Although I don't believe in God, Bach's music shows me what a love of God must feel like.
Alain de Botton
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A notorious inability to express emotions makes human beings the only animals capable of suicide.
Alain de Botton
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It's clear to me that there is no good reason for many philosophy books to sound as complicated as they do.
Alain de Botton