Quote

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.

Alain de Botton

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Alain de Botton
Age: 55
Born: 1969
Born: December 20
Journalist
Philosopher
Publisher
Writer
City of Zurich
Alain De Botton
Interest
Deeper
Bob
Purpose
Financial
Accumulation
Others
Concern
Laziness
Activity
Concerns
Meaning
Worldly
Displayed
Sort
Passings
Furious
Came
Patience
Overall
Understanding
Passing
Appeared

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Travel agents would be wiser to ask us what we hope to change about our lives rather than simply where we wish to go.
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Many moments in religion seem attractive to me even though I can't believe in any of it.
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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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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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Choosing a spouse and a choosing career: the two great decisions for which society refuses to set up institutional guidance.
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Most victories are, in the best way, acts of revenge.
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We used to build temples, and museums are about as close as secular society dares to go in facing up to the idea that a good building can change your life (and a bad one ruin it).
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We often lose our tempers not with those who are actually to blame just with those who love us enough to forgive us our foul moods.
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One of love's greatest drawbacks is that, for a while at least, it is in danger of making us happy.
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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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We may not agree with what religions are trying to teach us, but we can admire the institutional way in which they're doing it.
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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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If one felt successful, there'd be so little incentive to be successful.
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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.
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to design means forcing ourselves to unlearn what we believe we already know, patiently to take apart the mechanisms behind our reflexes and to acknowledge the mystery and stupefying complexity of everyday gestures like switching off a light of turning on a tap
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One of the best protections against disappointment is to have a lot going on.
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It's very hard to respect people on holiday - everybody looks so silly at the beach, it makes you hate humanity - but when you see people at their work they elicit respect, whether it's a mechanic, a stonemason or an accountant.
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To look at the paper is to raise a seashell to one's ear and to be overwhelmed by the roar of humanity.
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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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Everyone wants a better life: very few of us want to be better people.
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