Quote

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

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The largest part of what we call 'personality' is determined by how we've opted to defend ourselves against anxiety and sadness.
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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.
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It would scarcely be acceptable, for example, to ask in the course of an ordinary conversation what our society holds to be the purpose of work.
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We should keep a careful diary of our moments of envy: they are our covert guides to what we should try to do next.
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Pick up any newspaper or magazine, open the TV, and you'll be bombarded with suggestions of how to have a successful life. Some of these suggestions are deeply unhelpful to our own projects and priorities - and we should take care.
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Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than moving planes, ships or trains.
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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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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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The only way to be happy is to realise how much depends on how you look at things
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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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The greatest difficulty of Travel is that one is forced to take oneself along.
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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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Most of what makes a book 'good' is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.
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People only get really interesting when they start to rattle the bars of their cages.
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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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We wanted to test each other's capacity for survival: only if we had tried in vain to destroy one another would we know we were safe.
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Gaffe-focused journalism: revenge of intelligent people who know true evils are out there but lack the access/time to get to them.
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Although I don't believe in God, Bach's music shows me what a love of God must feel like.
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We should read other people's books in order to learn what we feel it is our own thoughts we should be developing, even if it is another writer's thought that help us to do so.
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It's as though either you accept [religious] doctrine and then you can have all the nice stuff, or you reject the doctrine and you're living in some kind of spiritual wasteland under the guidance of CNN and Walmart.
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