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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.

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
Drawbacks
Danger
Greatest
Least
Happy
Making
Love

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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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The fear of saying something stupid (which stupid people never have) has censored far more good ideas than bad ones.
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Without sex, we would be dangerously invulnerable. We might believe we were not ridiculous. We wouldn't know rejection and humiliation so intimately.
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We will cease to be angry once we cease to be so hopeful.
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The price we have paid for expecting to be so much more than our ancestors is a perpetual anxiety that we are far from being all we might be.
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When you look at the Moon, you think, ‘I’m really small. What are my problems?’ It sets things into perspective. We should all look at the Moon a bit more often.
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We need objects to remind us of the commitments we've made. That carpet from Morocco reminds us of the impulsive, freedom-loving side of ourselves we're in danger of losing touch with. Beautiful furniture gives us something to live up to. All designed objects are propaganda for a way of life.
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The inability to live in the present lies in the fear of leaving the sheltered position of anticipation or memory, and so of admitting that this is the only life that one is ever likely (heavenly intervention aside) to live.
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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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Despite its maddeningly vague, inarticulate form, anxiety is almost always trying to tell you something useful and apposite.
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The architects who benefit us most maybe those generous enough to lay aside their claims to genius in order to devote themselves to assembling graceful but predominantly unoriginal boxes. Architecture should have the confidence and the kindness to be a little boring.
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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.
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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.
Alain de Botton
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The only possible way to begin a book is to tell oneself that its eventual failure is guaranteed — but survivable.
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He did not mean to depress us, rather to free us from expectations which inspire bitterness. It is consoling, when love has let us down, to hear that happiness was never part of the plan.
Alain de Botton
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I learnt to stop fantasising about the perfect job or the perfect relationship because that can actually be an excuse for not living.
Alain de Botton
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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.
Alain de Botton
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The real issue is not whether baking biscuits is meaningful, but the extent to which the activity can seem to be so after it has been continuously stretched and subdivided across five thousand lives.
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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It is not just nature that defies us. Human life is as overwhelming... If we spend time in it [the vast spaces of nature], they may help us to accept more graciously the great, unfathomable events that molest our lives and will inevitably return us to dust.
Alain de Botton