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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
Humiliation
World
Gets
Serious
Trouble
Sense
Going
Much
Really

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I went to church and couldn't swallow it. The music was nice but I don't belong there.
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Arguments are like eels: however logical, they may slip from the minds weak grasp unless fixed there by imagery and style.
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A world where a majority had imbibed the lessons implicit within tragic art would be one in which the consequences of our failures would necessarily cease to weigh upon us so heavily.
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It's clear to me that there is no good reason for many philosophy books to sound as complicated as they do.
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Kant and Hegel are interesting thinkers. But I am happy to insist that they are also terrible writers.
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Envy: a confused, tangled guide to one's own ambitions.
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We each appear to hold within ourselves a range of divergent views as to our native qualities.. And amid such uncertainty, we typically turn to the wider world to settle the question of our significance.. we seem beholden to affections of others to endure ourselves.
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Being content is perhaps no less easy than playing the violin well: and requires no less practice.
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We are all more intelligent than we are capable, and awareness of the insanity of love has never saved anyone from the disease.
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It wasn't only fanatics and drunkards who began conversations with strangers in public.
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The more closely we analyze what we consider 'sexy,' the more clearly we will understand that eroticism is the feeling of excitement we experience at finding another human being who shares our values and our sense of the meaning of existence.
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What kills us isn't one big thing, but thousands of tiny obligations we can't turn down for fear of disappointing others.
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One wants never to give up this crystalline perspective. One wants to keep counterpositioning home with what one knows of alternative realities, as they exist in Tunis or Hyderabad. One wants never to forget that nothing here is normal, that the streets are different in Wisebaden, and Louyang, that this is just one of many possible worlds.
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As victims of hurt, we frequently don't bring up what ails us, because so many wounds look absurd in the light of day.
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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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The materialistic view of happiness of our age starkly revealed in our understanding of the word luxury.
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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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Good sex isn't just fun, it keeps us sane and happy. Having sex with someone makes us feel wanted, alive and potent.
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Bad architecture is in the end as much a failure of psychology as of design. It is an example expressed through materials of the same tendencies which in other domains will lead us to marry the wrong people, choose inappropriate jobs and book unsuccessful holidays: the tendency not to understand who we are and what will satisfy us.
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If we are inclined to forget how much there is in the world besides that which we anticipate, then works of art are perhaps a little to blame, for in them we find at work the same process of simplification or selection as in the imagination.
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