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

More quotes by Alain de Botton

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On paper, being good sounds great but a lot depends on the atmosphere of the workplace or community we live in. We tend to become good or bad depending on the cues sent out within a particular space.
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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In their different ways, art and philosophy help us, in Schopenhauer's words, to turn pain into knowledge.
Alain de Botton
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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.
Alain de Botton
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Despite its maddeningly vague, inarticulate form, anxiety is almost always trying to tell you something useful and apposite.
Alain de Botton
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The secular world is full of holes. We have secularized badly.
Alain de Botton
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The desire for high status is never stronger than in situations where ordinary life fails to answer a median need for dignity and comfort.
Alain de Botton
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The happiness that may emerge from taking a second look is central to Proust's therapeutic conception. It reveals the extent to which our dissatisfactions may be the result of failing to look properly at our lives rather than the result of anything inherently deficient about them.
Alain de Botton
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Perhaps it is true that we do not really exist until there is someone there to see us existing, we cannot properly speak until there is someone who can understand what we are saying in essence, we are not wholly alive until we are loved.
Alain de Botton
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Don't despair: despair suggests you are in total control and know what is coming. You don't - surrender to events with hope.
Alain de Botton
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It is in books, poems, paintings which often give us the confidence to take seriously feelings in ourselves that we might otherwise never have thought to acknowledge.
Alain de Botton
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The best cure for one's bad tendencies is to see them in action in another person.
Alain de Botton
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Must being in love always mean being in pain?
Alain de Botton
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Paying tax should be framed as a glorious civic duty worthy of gratitude - not a punishment for making money.
Alain de Botton
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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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As we write, so we build: to keep a record of what matters to us.
Alain de Botton
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We may seek a fortune for no greater reason than to secure the respect and attention of people who would otherwise look straight through us.
Alain de Botton
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I assemble my ideas in pieces on a computer file, then gradually find a place for them on a piece of scaffolding I erect.
Alain de Botton
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All tours are filled with humiliation. My publisher once hired a private jet to fly me to a venue where 1,000 people were waiting. It almost bankrupted him.
Alain de Botton
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Getting to the top has an unfortunate tendency to persuade people that the system is OK after all.
Alain de Botton