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Only by declaring a book completely finished can one start to see how much remains to be done on it.

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
Declaring
Finished
Remains
Completely
Start
Book
Done

More quotes by Alain de Botton

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The secular world is full of holes. We have secularized badly.
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I was foreign and Jewish, with a funny name, and was very small and hated sport, a real problem at an English prep school. So the way to get round it was to become the school joker, which I did quite effectively - I was always fooling around to make the people who would otherwise dump me in the loo laugh.
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There is always the option of being emotionally lazy, that is, of quoting.
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Though debts are condemned in the financial world, the world of friendship and love may perversely depend on well-managed debts.
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Sweetness is the opposite of machismo, which is everywhere-and I really don't get on with machismo. I'm interested in sensitivity, and weakness, and fear, and anxiety, because I think that, at the end of the day, behind our masks, that's what we are.
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Our minds are susceptible to the influence of external voices telling us what we require to be satisfied, voices that may drown out the faint sounds emitted by our souls and distract us from the careful, arduous task of accurately naming our priorities.
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Unnatural to expect that learning to be happy should be any easier than, say, learning to play the violin or require any less practice.
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The only way to be happy is to realise how much depends on how you look at things
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A good half of the art of living is resilience.
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I thought about societies where exceptional fortunes are built up in industries with very little connection to out sincere and significant needs, industries where it is difficult to escape from the disparity between a seriousness of means and a triviality of ends.
Alain de Botton
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Unhappiness can stem from having only one perspective to play with.
Alain de Botton
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Anyone who isn't embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn't learning enough.
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The genius of religions is that they structure the inner life.
Alain de Botton
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Though it may feel otherwise, enjoying life is no more dangerous than apprehending it with continuous anxiety and gloom.
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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.
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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The only people we can think of as normal are those we don't yet know very well.
Alain de Botton
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Those who divorce aren't necessarily the most unhappy, just those neatly able to believe their misery is caused by one other person.
Alain de Botton
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We will cease to be angry once we cease to be so hopeful.
Alain de Botton
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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?
Alain de Botton