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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: 55
Born: 1969
Born: December 20
Journalist
Philosopher
Publisher
Writer
City of Zurich
Alain De Botton
Tangled
Ambitions
Guide
Guides
Confused
Envy
Ambition

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Religions are so subtle, so complicated, so intelligent in many ways that they're not fit to be abandoned to the religious alone they're for all of us.
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Despite its maddeningly vague, inarticulate form, anxiety is almost always trying to tell you something useful and apposite.
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Feeling lost, crazy and desperate belongs to a good life as much as optimism, certainty and reason.
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Cynics are - beneath it all - only idealists with awkwardly high standards.
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Bad art might be defined as a series of bad choices about what to show and what to leave out.
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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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Rather than saying 'I hate mess', it might draw more compassion to say, 'mess terrifies me as a harbinger of catastrophe'.
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Most victories are, in the best way, acts of revenge.
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As adults, we try to develop the character traits that would have rescued our parents.
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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.
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As an atheist, I think there are lots of things religions get up to which are of value to non-believers - and one of those things is trying to be a bit better than we normally manage to be.
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Perhaps it is true that we do not really exist until there is someone there to see us existing, we cannot properly speak until there is someone who can understand what we are saying in essence, we are not wholly alive until we are loved.
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People who readily accept the need for a gym will resist that their personalities might need some work too.
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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.
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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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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.
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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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The longing for a destiny is no nowhere stronger than in our romantic life. All too often forced to share our bed with those who cannot fathom our soul, can we not be forgiven if we believe ourselves fated to stumble one day upon the man or woman of our dreams.
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It wasn't only fanatics and drunkards who began conversations with strangers in public.
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The activities of drawing, eating and drinking, all involve assimilations by the self of desirable elements from the world, a transfer of goodness from without to within.
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