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We accept the need to train extensively to fly a plane but think instinct should be enough for marrying and raising kids.

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
Needs
Planes
Think
Instinct
Thinking
Train
Accept
Accepting
Extensively
Kids
Marrying
Need
Plane
Enough
Raising

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There is real danger of a disconnect between what's on your business card and who you are deep inside, and it's not a disconnect that the world is ready to be patient with.
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A 'good job' can be both practically attractive while still not good enough to devote your entire life to.
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We are certainly influenced by role models, and if we are surrounded by images of beautiful rich people, we will start to think that to be beautiful and rich is very important - just as in the Middle Ages, people were surrounded by images of religious piety.
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As we write, so we build: to keep a record of what matters to us.
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The secular world is full of holes. We have secularized badly.
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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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There is a devilishly direct relationship between the significance of an idea and how nervous we become at the prospect of having to think about it.
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The most unbearable thing about many successful people is not - as we flatteringly think - how lazy they are, but how hard they work.
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Socrates, on being insulted in the marketplace, asked by a passerby, Don't you worry about being called names? retorted, Why? Do you think I should resent it if an ass had kicked me?
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Philosophy had supplied Socrates with convictions in which he had been able to have rational, as opposed to hysterical, confidence when faced with disapproval.
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It is perhaps sad books that best console us when we are sad.
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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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We often lose our tempers not with those who are actually to blame just with those who love us enough to forgive us our foul moods.
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Bad art might be defined as a series of bad choices about what to show and what to leave out.
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Being incomprehensible offers unparalleled protection against having nothing to say...but writing with simplicity requires courage, for there is a danger that one will be overlooked, dismissed as simpleminded by those with a tenacious belief that the impassable prose is a hallmark of intelligence.
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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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My writing always came out of a very personal place, out of an attempt to stay sane.
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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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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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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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