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've succeeded as far as I'm concerned - I don't feel that I have any cliffs I could fall over anytime soon.
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I don't ever want to lose that mind-set where you've got to be able to realize different ideas-slash-fantasies-slash-possibilities in your life.
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Every time I sit down with a powerful working mom, I wrestle with whether to ask the 'mom question.' I don't want to be part of perpetuating a double standard by asking women in business a question that men are not asked.
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I'm interested in confronting police brutality and police abuse of cracking down on street performers and street artists, but also in valorizing street art as legitimate performance within the artistic sphere, where it's so often conflated with pan-handling and begging and not "successful" art. I want to change laws around street performance.
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Most people don't remember names, for the simple reason that they don't take the time and energy necessary to concentrate and repeat and fix names indelibly in their minds. They make excuses for themselves; they are too busy.
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In their different ways, art and philosophy help us, in Schopenhauer's words, to turn pain into knowledge.
