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Year-end financial statements … express a truth about office life which is no less irrefutable-yet also, in the end, no less irrelevant or irritating-than an evolutionary biologist’s proud reminder that the purpose of existence lies in the propagation of our genes.
Alain de Botton -
It is by finding out what something is not that one comes closest to understanding what it is.
Alain de Botton
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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.
Alain de Botton -
The origins and travels of our purchases remain matters of indifference, although-to the more imaginative at least-a slight dampness at the bottom of a carton, or an obscure code printed along a computer cable, may hint at processes of manufacture and transport nobler and more mysterious, more worthy of wonder and study, than the very goods themselves.
Alain de Botton -
By travelling across frontiers, on horseback and in the imagination, Montaigne invited us to to exchange local prejudices and the self division they induced for less constraining identities as citizens of the world.
Alain de Botton -
In their different ways, art and philosophy help us, in Schopenhauer's words, to turn pain into knowledge.
Alain de Botton -
There may be no good reason for things to be the way they are.
Alain de Botton -
For all his understanding of worldly concerns, when it came to fathoming the deeper meaning of his own furious activity, Sir Bob displayed the sort of laziness for which he himself had no patience in others. He appeared to have only a passing interest in the overall purpose of his financial accumulation.
Alain de Botton
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True respectability stems not from the will of the majority but from proper reasoning.
Alain de Botton -
Alcohol-inspired fights … are a reminder of the price we pay for our daily submission at the altars of prudence and order.
Alain de Botton -
It is striking how much more seriously we are likely to be taken after we have been dead a few centuries.
Alain de Botton -
These entrepreneurs were writing their stories in a subgenre of contemporary fiction, the business plan, and populating them with characters endowed with deeply implausible personalities, an oversight which would eventually be punished not by a scathing review, … but by a lack of custom.
Alain de Botton -
Philosophy had supplied Socrates with convictions in which he had been able to have rational, as opposed to hysterical, confidence when faced with disapproval.
Alain de Botton -
Not everyone is worth listening to.
Alain de Botton