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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.

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
Littles
Deserve
Reason
Bits
Live
Wisdom
Prestige
Little
Literature
Deserves
Dies
Sanity
Help
Tool
Helping
Goodness
Others
Tools

More quotes by Alain de Botton

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There may be significant things to learn about people by looking at what annoys them most.
Alain de Botton
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At the heart of every frustration lies a basic structure: the collision of a wish with an unyielding reality.
Alain de Botton
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One of the best protections against disappointment is to have a lot going on.
Alain de Botton
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It is perhaps sad books that best console us when we are sad.
Alain de Botton
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Let's say you went to Harvard or Oxford or Cambridge, and you said, 'I've come here because I'm in search of morality, guidance and consolation I want to know how to live,' - they would show you the way to the insane asylum.
Alain de Botton
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In a secularising world, art has replaced religion as a touchstone of our reverence and devotion.
Alain de Botton
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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.
Alain de Botton
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Why, then, if expensive things cannot bring us remarkable joy, are we so powerfully drawn to them?
Alain de Botton
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Anxiety is the handmaiden of contemporary ambition.
Alain de Botton
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Intuition is unconscious accumulated experience informing judgement in real time.
Alain de Botton
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The dream of the news is that it makes us care about other people and situations. But we cannot identify with people to whom we haven't been introduced. Humans will only respond to art, to people who are skilled in making you care.
Alain de Botton
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It is perhaps when our lives are at their most problematic that we are likely to be most receptive to beautiful things.
Alain de Botton
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One wants never to give up this crystalline perspective. One wants to keep counterpositioning home with what one knows of alternative realities, as they exist in Tunis or Hyderabad. One wants never to forget that nothing here is normal, that the streets are different in Wisebaden, and Louyang, that this is just one of many possible worlds.
Alain de Botton
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Taking architecture seriously therefore makes some singular and strenuous demands upon us...It means conceding that we are inconveniently vulnerable to the colour of our wallpaper and that our sense of purpose may be derailed by an unfortunate bedspread
Alain de Botton
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It should not be Illiers-Combray that we visit: a genuine homage to Proust would be to look at our world through his eyes, not look at his world through our eyes.
Alain de Botton
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Most of what makes a book 'good' is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.
Alain de Botton
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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.
Alain de Botton
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The problem isn't so much finding good ideas (there is no shortage) as embedding the ones we have into everyday practice.
Alain de Botton
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I passionately believe that's it's not just what you say that counts, it's also how you say it - that the success of your argument critically depends on your manner of presenting it.
Alain de Botton
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When I see someone like Richard Dawkins, I see my father. I grew up with that. I'm basically the child of Richard Dawkins.
Alain de Botton