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As we write, so we build: to keep a record of what matters to us.

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
Writing
Matters
Record
Build
Records
Write
Keep
Matter

More quotes by Alain de Botton

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Intuition is unconscious accumulated experience informing judgement in real time.
Alain de Botton
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Objectively good spaces to work rarely end up being so in their faultlessness, quiet and well-equipped studios have a habit of rendering the fear of failure overwhelming. Original thoughts are like shy animals. We sometimes have to look the other way - towards a busy street or terminal - before they run out of their burrows.
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 wanted to test each other's capacity for survival: only if we had tried in vain to destroy one another would we know we were safe.
Alain de Botton
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Curiosity takes ignorance seriously - and is confident enough to admit when it's in the dark. It is aware of not knowing. And then it sets out to do something about it.
Alain de Botton
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Choosing a spouse and a choosing career: the two great decisions for which society refuses to set up institutional guidance.
Alain de Botton
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The degree of sympathy we feel regarding another's fiasco is directly proportional to how easy or difficult it is for us to imagine ourselves, under like circumstances, making a similar mistake.
Alain de Botton
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We read the weird tales in newspapers to crowd out the even weirder stuff inside us.
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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Being content is perhaps no less easy than playing the violin well: and requires no less practice.
Alain de Botton
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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.
Alain de Botton
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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.
Alain de Botton
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Her lie was symptomatic of a certain pride she took in mocking the romantic, in being unsentimental, matter-of-fact, stoic yet at heart she was the oppo site: idealistic, dreamy, giving, and deeply attached to everything she liked verbally to dismiss as mushy.
Alain de Botton
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A virtuous, ordinary life, striving for wisdom but never far from folly, is achievement enough.
Alain de Botton
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We are presented with an unpleasant choice between either committing to peculiar concepts about immaterial deities or letting go entirely of a host of consoling, subtle or just charming rituals for which we struggle to find equivalents in secular society.
Alain de Botton
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It wasn't only fanatics and drunkards who began conversations with strangers in public.
Alain de Botton
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Every adult life could be said to be defined by two great love stories: the story of our quest for sexual love and the story of our quest for love from the world.
Alain de Botton
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Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone - and finding that that's ok with them.
Alain de Botton
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People only get really interesting when they start to rattle the bars of their cages.
Alain de Botton
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I am conscious of trying to stretch the boundaries of non-fiction writing. It's always surprised me how little attention many non-fiction writers pay to the formal aspects of their work.
Alain de Botton