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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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One kind of good book should leave you asking: how did the author know that about me?
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A dominant impulse on encountering beauty is to wish to hold on to it, to possess it and give it weight in one’s life. There is an urge to say, ‘I was here, I saw this and it mattered to me.
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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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Serious journalists often imagine society is adrift because people don't know certain things. Yet often, they know but just don't care. So the task of serious journalism isn't just to lay out truths. It is to make vital truths compelling to a big audience.
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Dreams reveal we never quite get 'over' anything: it's all still in there somewhere.
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He was marked out by his relentless ability to find fault with others' mediocrity - suggesting that a certain type of intelligence may be at heart nothing more or less than a superior capacity for dissatisfaction.
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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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Work finally begins when the fear of doing nothing exceeds the fear of doing it badly.
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Memory is... similar to anticipation: an instrument of simplification and selection.
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To cut out every negative root would simultaneously mean choking off positive elements that might arise from it further up the stem of the plant. We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them.
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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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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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Politics is so difficult, it's generally only people who aren't quite up to the task who feel convinced they are.
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We read the weird tales in newspapers to crowd out the even weirder stuff inside us.
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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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Writing isn’t a career choice. It’s self-medication that over time precipitates the madness it was meant to ward off.
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The activities of drawing, eating and drinking, all involve assimilations by the self of desirable elements from the world, a transfer of goodness from without to within.
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Art holds out the promise of inner wholeness.
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A world where a majority had imbibed the lessons implicit within tragic art would be one in which the consequences of our failures would necessarily cease to weigh upon us so heavily.
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