Quote

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
Reason
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Ill
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Successful
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Years
Death
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Also
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Lucretius

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The longing for destiny is nowhere stronger than in our romantic life.
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Our jobs make relentless calls on a narrow band of our faculties, reducing our chances of achieving rounded personalities and leaving us to suspect (often in the gathering darkness of a Sunday evening) that much of who we are, or could be, has gone unexplored.
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Newspapers are being read all around. The point is not, of course, to glean new information, but rather to coax the mind out of its sleep-induced introspective temper.
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The price we have paid for expecting to be so much more than our ancestors is a perpetual anxiety that we are far from being all we might be.
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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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The telephone becomes an instrument of torture in the demonic hands of a beloved who doesn't call.
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Pegging your contentment to the overall state of the world rather than of your own life: the basis of morality, or a sort of madness?
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The dream of the news is that it makes us care about other people and situations. But we cannot identify with people to whom we haven't been introduced. Humans will only respond to art, to people who are skilled in making you care.
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In the gap between who we wish one day to be and who we are at present, must come pain, anxiety, envy and humiliation.
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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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To one's enemies: I hate myself more than you ever could.
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Our homes do not have to offer us permanent occupancy or store our clothes to merit the name. To speak of home in relation to a building is simply to recognise its harmony with our own prized internal song. Home can be an airport or a library, a garden or a motorway diner.
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It is by finding out what something is not that one comes closest to understanding what it is.
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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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Booksellers are the most valuable destination for the lonely, given the numbers of books that were written because authors couldn't find anyone to talk to.
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For paranoia about 'what other people think' : remember that only some hate, a very few love - and almost all just don't care.
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The good parent: someone who doesn't mind, for a time, being hated by their children.
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There is always the option of being emotionally lazy, that is, of quoting.
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We envy only those whom we feel ourselves to be like we envy only members of our reference group. There are few successes more unendurable than those of our close friends.
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...if the beginnings of love and amorous politics are equally rosy, then the ends may be equally bloody.
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