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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.

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
Well
Became
Stretch
Going
Beyond
Card
Work
Forever
Cards
Long
Business
Useful
People
Remember
Workers
Wells
Tools
Human
Identity
Humans
Continue
Identities

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For all his understanding of worldly concerns, when it came to fathoming the deeper meaning of his own furious activity, Sir Bob displayed the sort of laziness for which he himself had no patience in others. He appeared to have only a passing interest in the overall purpose of his financial accumulation.
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Taking photographs can assuage the itch for possession sparked by the beauty of a place our anxiety over losing a precious scene can decline with every click of the shutter.
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Forcing people to eat together is an effective way to promote tolerance.
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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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Most of our childhood is stored not in photos, but in certain biscuits, lights of day, smells, textures of carpet.
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Choosing a spouse and a choosing career: the two great decisions for which society refuses to set up institutional guidance.
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It is perhaps sad books that best console us when we are sad.
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After 40 (old age for most of man's history), one should strive to be more or less packed and ready to go were the end call to come.
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Literature deserves its prestige for one reason above all others - because it's a tool to help us live and die with a little bit more wisdom, goodness, and sanity.
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It seems the only way to write a half decent book is to worry oneself sick on an hourly basis that one is producing a complete disaster.
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One of the unexpectedly important things that art can do for us is to teach us how to suffer more successfully.
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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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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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There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life.
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The only people we can think of as normal are those we don't yet know very well.
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Endeavoring to purchase something we think beautiful may in fact be the most unimaginative way of dealing with the longing it excites in us, just as trying to sleep with someone may be the bluntest response to a feeling of love.
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The greatest difficulty of Travel is that one is forced to take oneself along.
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One of love's greatest drawbacks is that, for a while at least, it is in danger of making us happy.
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The attentions of others matter to us because we are afflicted by a congenital uncertainty as to our own value, as a result of which affliction we tend to allow others' appraisals to play a determining role in how we see ourselves. Our sense of identity is held captive by the judgements of those we live among.
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Responsible for wrapping the iron fist of authority in its velvet glove is Jane Axtell, head of the accountancy firm's Human Resources department.
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