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Being funny should be an incidental byproduct of trying to get to something truthful, not a destination in itself.

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
Funny
Trying
Something
Byproduct
Incidental
Truthful
Destination

More quotes by Alain de Botton

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There is real danger of a disconnect between what's on your business card and who you are deep inside, and it's not a disconnect that the world is ready to be patient with.
Alain de Botton
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Literature deeply stands opposed to the dominant value system-the one that rewards money and power. Writers are on the other side-they make us sympathetic to ideas and feelings that are of deep importance but can’t afford airtime in a commercialized, status-consciou s, and cynical world.
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.
Alain de Botton
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Though debts are condemned in the financial world, the world of friendship and love may perversely depend on well-managed debts.
Alain de Botton
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Our responses to the world are crucially moulded by the company we keep, for we temper our curiosity to fit in with the expectations of others.
Alain de Botton
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Envy: a confused, tangled guide to one's own ambitions.
Alain de Botton
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It is no coincidence that the Western attraction to sublime landscapes developed at precisely the moment when traditional beliefs in God began to wane.
Alain de Botton
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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.
Alain de Botton
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Our sense of what is valuable will hence be radically distorted if we must perpetually condemn as tedious everything we lack, simply because we lack it.
Alain de Botton
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Mental health: having enough safe places in your mind for your thoughts to settle.
Alain de Botton
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Our minds are susceptible to the influence of external voices telling us what we require to be satisfied, voices that may drown out the faint sounds emitted by our souls and distract us from the careful, arduous task of accurately naming our priorities.
Alain de Botton
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Artistic accounts involve severe abbreviations of what reality will force upon us.
Alain de Botton
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Happiness may be difficult to obtain. The obstacles are not primarily financial.
Alain de Botton
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Only by declaring a book completely finished can one start to see how much remains to be done on it.
Alain de Botton
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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.
Alain de Botton
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Being content is perhaps no less easy than playing the violin well: and requires no less practice.
Alain de Botton
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The secular world is full of holes. We have secularized badly.
Alain de Botton
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The greatest works of art speak to us without knowing us.
Alain de Botton
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Out of the millions of people we live among, most of whom we habitually ignore and are ignored by in turn, there are always a few that hold hostage our capacity for happiness, whom we could recognize by their smell alone and whom we would rather die than be without.
Alain de Botton
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The blunt large questions become connected to smaller, apparently esoteric ones.
Alain de Botton