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Much of the really serious trouble in the world gets going with a sense of humiliation.

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
Much
Really
World
Humiliation
Gets
Serious
Trouble
Sense
Going

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Not being understood may be taken as a sign that there is much in one to understand.
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what we call a home is merely any place that succeeds in making more consistenly available to us the important truths which the wider world ignores, or which our distracted and irresolute selves have trouble holding onto. (p123) Architecture of Happiness
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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.
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Pegging your contentment to the overall state of the world rather than of your own life: the basis of morality, or a sort of madness?
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Work finally begins when the fear of doing nothing exceeds the fear of doing it badly.
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Despite the best efforts of critics and the hopes of authors, our tastes in books are probably as inherent & unbudgeable as those in food.
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Writing a book has about it some of the anxiety of telling a joke and having to wait several years to know whether or not it was funny.
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According to Montaigne, it was the oppressive notion that we had complete mental control over our bodies, and the horror of departing from this portrait of normality, that had left the man unable to perform sexually.
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Many moments in religion seem attractive to me even though I can't believe in any of it.
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It's as though either you accept [religious] doctrine and then you can have all the nice stuff, or you reject the doctrine and you're living in some kind of spiritual wasteland under the guidance of CNN and Walmart.
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The telephone becomes an instrument of torture in the demonic hands of a beloved who doesn't call.
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Because the rhythm of conversation makes no allowance for dead periods, because the presence of others calls for continuous responses, we are left to regret the inanity of what we say, and the missed opportunity of what we do not.
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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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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.
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We should not be frightened by appearances.
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Life gives us no such handy markers - a storm comes, and far from this being a harbinger of death and collapse, during its course a person discovers love and truth, beauty and happiness, the rain lashing at the windows all the while.
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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.
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I am in general a very pessimistic person with an optimistic, day to day take on things. The bare facts of life are utterly terrifying. And yet, one can laugh. Indeed, one has to laugh precisely because of the darkness: the nervous laughter of the trenches.
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The media insists on taking what someone didn't mean to say as being far closer to the truth than what they did.
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