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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
Ambitions
Guide
Guides
Confused
Envy
Ambition
Tangled

More quotes by Alain de Botton

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Kant and Hegel are interesting thinkers. But I am happy to insist that they are also terrible writers.
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We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them.
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The genius of religions is that they structure the inner life.
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Most good thinking has its origin in fear.
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Being funny should be an incidental byproduct of trying to get to something truthful, not a destination in itself.
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The pleasure we derive from journeys is perhaps dependent more on the mindset with which we travel than on the destination we travel to.
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Intuition is unconscious accumulated experience informing judgement in real time.
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The mind does most of its best thinking when we aren't there. The answers are there in the morning.
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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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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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There is always the option of being emotionally lazy, that is, of quoting.
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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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We read the weird tales in newspapers to crowd out the even weirder stuff inside us.
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The fear of saying something stupid (which stupid people never have) has censored far more good ideas than bad ones.
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Being content is perhaps no less easy than playing the violin well: and requires no less practice.
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There are people who say, 'Oh this guy is quite thick.' I think the reason is that, increasingly, I don't mind being simple in terms of literary expression. Others say, 'No, no, no. He went to Cambridge. He got a good degree. He must be Einstein.'
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We are sensitized by the books we read. And the more books we read, and the deeper their lessons sink into us, the more pairs of glasses we have. And those glasses enable us to see things we would have otherwise missed.
Alain de Botton
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We don't really learn anything properly until there is a problem, until we are in pain, until something fails to go as we had hoped ... We suffer, therefore we think.
Alain de Botton
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Our greatest furies spring from events which violate our sense of the ground of our existence.
Alain de Botton
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Let death find us as we are building up our matchstick protests against its waves.
Alain de Botton