Alain de Botton Quotes
In their different ways, art and philosophy help us, in Schopenhauer's words, to turn pain into knowledge.
Quotes to Explore
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I applied to only one college - the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania - and was fortunate to be accepted. After graduation, I headed to Wall Street and worked as I had dreamed.
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I can enjoy anywhere, and I can leave it. Life is about moving on.
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I'm an optimist about other people. I'm not an optimist about myself.
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You don't go out and change your gender for a television show, O.K.? It ain't happening. I don't care who you are.
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Flipping through the 'Toronto Star' one day in 2008, I noticed a piece about a phenomenal boxer from the Philippines who had won several different titles in several different weight divisions. Manny Pacquiao's rise from heart-crushing poverty to the top ranks of his sport was astounding.
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Goals enable you to do more for yourself and others, too.
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I like to have fun, but I don't think of myself as being funny. But I'm a big jokester, so I make fun of myself a lot!
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I never felt a need to manipulate my career from the outside - try to be someone I wasn't to get ahead.
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I'm happy pretty well anywhere on this big, beautiful planet.
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My grandmother's first husband was a spiritualist medium. What fascinates me about that is the balance between conviction and sincerity and trickery, which is also something that novelists are very familiar with.
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We shot 'Telusa Telusa' song in Bolivia. It took us 50 hours to get to the location. We shot in high altitudes, and oxygen cylinders were kept handy.
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My brother married young, and his is the best marriage I know.
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'OLTL' has now allowed me to sing through the character as Blair. If you've followed my 20-some-odd-year career, you know I am a singer.
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The thing that I really look for in people is enthusiasm and excitement and, not to sound really sappy, that fire in their eyes.
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Horrors, I believe, should be original - the use of common myths and legends being a weakening influence.
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I feel as if I've been fairly successful with maintaining a cohesive tone between the work I make as a photographer and as a director.
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Habit is a great deadener.
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Men's actions are too strong for them. Show me a man who has acted, and who has not been the victim and slave of his action.
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I believe in music.
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I wasn't the leader of any gang. I was for Billy all the time.
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This is what being alive feels like, you know? The place doesn't matter. You just live.
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I'm a royal pain in the behind.
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War and famine would not do. Instead, disease offered the most efficient and fastest way to kill the billions that must soon die if the population crisis is to be solved. AIDS is not an efficient killer because it is too slow. My favorite candidate for eliminating 90 percent of the world's population is airborne Ebola (Ebola Reston), because it is both highly lethal and it kills in days, instead of years. "We've got airborne diseases with 90 percent mortality in humans. Killing humans. Think about that. "You know, the bird flu's good, too. For everyone who survives, he will have to bury nine.
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In their different ways, art and philosophy help us, in Schopenhauer's words, to turn pain into knowledge.
