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The only way to be happy is to realise how much depends on how you look at things
Alain de Botton
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Alain de Botton
Age: 55
Born: 1969
Born: December 20
Journalist
Philosopher
Publisher
Writer
City of Zurich
Alain De Botton
Realising
Depends
Happy
Look
Looks
Much
Way
Things
Realise
More quotes by Alain de Botton
Year-end financial statements express a truth about office life which is no less irrefutable yet also, in the end, no less irrelevant or irritating than an evolutionary biologist's proud reminder that the purpose of existence lies in the propagation of our genes.
Alain de Botton
We should not be frightened by appearances.
Alain de Botton
Memory is... similar to anticipation: an instrument of simplification and selection.
Alain de Botton
A danger of travel is that we see things at the wrong time, before we have had a chance to build up the necessary receptivity and when new information is therefore as useless and fugitive as necklace beads without a connecting chain.
Alain de Botton
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
Reputation matters so much only because people so seldom think for themselves.
Alain de Botton
Happiness may be difficult to obtain. The obstacles are not primarily financial.
Alain de Botton
Everyone returns us to a different sense of ourselves, for we become a little of who they think we are.
Alain de Botton
Rather than employing it as a supplement to active, conscious seeing, they used the medium as a substitute, paying less attention to the world than they had done previously, taking it on faith that photography automatically assured them possession of it.
Alain de Botton
The greatest works of art speak to us without knowing us.
Alain de Botton
Choosing a spouse and a choosing career: the two great decisions for which society refuses to set up institutional guidance.
Alain de Botton
Objectively good spaces to work rarely end up being so in their faultlessness, quiet and well-equipped studios have a habit of rendering the fear of failure overwhelming. Original thoughts are like shy animals. We sometimes have to look the other way - towards a busy street or terminal - before they run out of their burrows.
Alain de Botton
One's doing well if age improves even slightly one's capacity to hold on to that vital truism: This too shall pass.
Alain de Botton
Anyone who isn't embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn't learning enough.
Alain de Botton
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.
Alain de Botton
Religions are so subtle, so complicated, so intelligent in many ways that they're not fit to be abandoned to the religious alone they're for all of us.
Alain de Botton
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.
Alain de Botton
If it is true that love is the pursuit in another of qualities we lack in ourselves, then in our love of someone from another culture, one ambition may be to weld ourselves more closely to values missing from our own culture.
Alain de Botton
It is by finding out what something is not that one comes closest to understanding what it is.
Alain de Botton
Only as we mature does affection begin to depend on achievement.
Alain de Botton
