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In the works of Lucretius, we find two reasons why we shouldn't worry about death. If you have had a successful life, Lucretius tell us, there's no reason to mind its end. And, if you haven't had a good time, Why do you seek to add more years, which would also pass but ill?

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
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Lucretius

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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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Despite the best efforts of critics and the hopes of authors, our tastes in books are probably as inherent & unbudgeable as those in food.
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There are selections so acute that they come to define a place, with the result that we can no longer travel through that landscape without being reminded of what a great artist noticed there.
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We are all more intelligent than we are capable, and awareness of the insanity of love has never saved anyone from the disease.
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I feel that the great challenge of our time is the communication of ideas.
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The more closely we analyze what we consider 'sexy,' the more clearly we will understand that eroticism is the feeling of excitement we experience at finding another human being who shares our values and our sense of the meaning of existence.
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Paying tax should be framed as a glorious civic duty worthy of gratitude - not a punishment for making money.
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Never too late to learn some embarrassingly basic, stupidly obvious things about oneself.
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Every realistic picture represents a choice as to which features of reality should be given prominence no painting ever captures the whole.
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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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Mental health: having enough safe places in your mind for your thoughts to settle.
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We study biology, physics, movements of glaciers... Where are the classes on envy, feeling wronged, despair, bitterness.
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Distress at losing an object can be as much a frustration at the intellectual mystery of the disappearance as about the loss itself.
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One of the best protections against disappointment is to have a lot going on.
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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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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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Good books put a finger on emotions that are deeply our own - but that we could never have described on our own.
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I think people want to get married to end their emotional uncertainty. In a way, they want to end powerful feelings, or certainly the negative ones.
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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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