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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
Depends
Happy
Look
Looks
Much
Way
Things
Realise
Realising

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Distress at losing an object can be as much a frustration at the intellectual mystery of the disappearance as about the loss itself.
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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.
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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.
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Good books put a finger on emotions that are deeply our own - but that we could never have described on our own.
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A successful work will draw out the features capable of exciting a sense of beauty and interest in the spectator.
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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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There may be significant things to learn about people by looking at what annoys them most.
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What should worry us is not the number of people that oppose us, but how good their reasons are for doing so.
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We envy only those whom we feel ourselves to be like we envy only members of our reference group. There are few successes more unendurable than those of our close friends.
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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.
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The moment we cry in a film is not when things are sad but when they turn out to be more beautiful than we expected them to be.
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There is a devilishly direct relationship between the significance of an idea and how nervous we become at the prospect of having to think about it.
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There are selections so acute that they come to define a place, with the result that we can no longer travel through that landscape without being reminded of what a great artist noticed there.
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In Britain, because I live here, I can also run into problems of envy and competition. But all this is just in a day's work for a writer. You can't put stuff out there without someone calling you a complete fool. Oh, well.
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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.
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The arrogance that says analysing the relationship between reasons and causes is more important than writing a philosophy of shyness or sadness or friendship drives me nuts. I can't accept that.
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Every adult life could be said to be defined by two great love stories: the story of our quest for sexual love and the story of our quest for love from the world.
Alain de Botton
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We are continuously challenged to discover new works of culture—and, in the process, we don’t allow any one of them to assume a weight in our minds.
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Insomnia is a glamorous term for thoughts you forgot to have in the day.
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These inventors were elevating the formulation of entrepreneurial ideas to the status of a visionary activity. Though forced to justify their efforts in the pragmatic language of venture capital, they were at heart utopian thinkers intent on transforming the world.
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