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When Proust urges us to evaluate the world properly, he repeatedly reminds us of the value of modest scenes.

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
World
Reminds
Modest
Urges
Scenes
Properly
Scene
Proust
Value
Repeatedly
Values
Evaluate

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Not being understood may be taken as a sign that there is much in one to understand.
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We each appear to hold within ourselves a range of divergent views as to our native qualities.. And amid such uncertainty, we typically turn to the wider world to settle the question of our significance.. we seem beholden to affections of others to endure ourselves.
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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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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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When work is not going well, it's useful to remember that our identities stretch beyond what is on the business card, that we were people long before we became workers - and will continue to be human once we have put our tools down forever.
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We read the weird tales in newspapers to crowd out the even weirder stuff inside us.
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In their different ways, art and philosophy help us, in Schopenhauer's words, to turn pain into knowledge.
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It is in dialogue with pain that many beautiful things acquire their value. Acquaintance with grief turns out to be one of the more unusual prerequisites of architectural appreciation. We might, quite aside from all other requirements, need to be a little sad before buildings can properly touch us.
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The lesson? To respond to the unexpected and hurtful behavior of others with something more than a wipe of the glasses, to see it as a chance to expand our understanding.
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One rarely falls in love without being as much attracted to what is interestingly wrong with someone as what is objectively healthy.
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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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Reputation matters so much only because people so seldom think for themselves.
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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.
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Curiosity might be pictured as being made up of chains of small questions extending outwards, sometimes over huge distances, from a central hub composed of a few blunt, large questions.
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So many complaints boil down to the belly ache of the fragile, mortal, ignored ego in a vast and indifferent universe.
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I thought about societies where exceptional fortunes are built up in industries with very little connection to out sincere and significant needs, industries where it is difficult to escape from the disparity between a seriousness of means and a triviality of ends.
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Every adult life could be said to be defined by two great love stories: the story of our quest for sexual love and the story of our quest for love from the world.
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Though debts are condemned in the financial world, the world of friendship and love may perversely depend on well-managed debts.
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The genius of religions is that they structure the inner life.
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Architects themselves tend to shy away from the word, preferring instead to talk about the manipulation of space.
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