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Envy: a confused, tangled guide to one's own ambitions.

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
Guides
Confused
Envy
Ambition
Tangled
Ambitions
Guide

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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.
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as the determinants of high status keep shifting, so, too, naturally, will the triggers of status anxiety be altered.
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Our bodies hold our minds hostage to their whims and rhythms.
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Responsible for wrapping the iron fist of authority in its velvet glove is Jane Axtell, head of the accountancy firm's Human Resources department.
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It is not just nature that defies us. Human life is as overwhelming... If we spend time in it [the vast spaces of nature], they may help us to accept more graciously the great, unfathomable events that molest our lives and will inevitably return us to dust.
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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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It seems that most of us could benefit from a brush with a near-fatal disaster to help us recognise the important things that we are too defeated or embittered to recognise from day to day.
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It is striking how much more seriously we are likely to be taken after we have been dead a few centuries.
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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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Work finally begins when the fear of doing nothing exceeds the fear of doing it badly.
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You need a long hard day's work to reveal the logic of the craving for very bad tv and alcohol.
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One wants never to give up this crystalline perspective. One wants to keep counterpositioning home with what one knows of alternative realities, as they exist in Tunis or Hyderabad. One wants never to forget that nothing here is normal, that the streets are different in Wisebaden, and Louyang, that this is just one of many possible worlds.
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Memory is... similar to anticipation: an instrument of simplification and selection.
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The finest proof of our loyalty toward one another was our monstrous disloyalties towards everyone else.
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Most of us still caged within careers chosen for us by our not entirely worldly 18-22 year old selves.
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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.
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Life gives us no such handy markers - a storm comes, and far from this being a harbinger of death and collapse, during its course a person discovers love and truth, beauty and happiness, the rain lashing at the windows all the while.
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As victims of hurt, we frequently don't bring up what ails us, because so many wounds look absurd in the light of day.
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Happiness is impossible for longer than 15 minutes. We are the descendants of creatures who, above all else, worried.
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