Alain de Botton Quotes
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It is by finding out what something is not that one comes closest to understanding what it is.
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Our greatest furies spring from events which violate our sense of the ground of our existence.
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Workers were occupied with the ancient task of trying to stay alive, which simply happened to require, in a consumer economy overwhelmingly based on the satisfaction of peripheral desires, a series of activities all to easily confused with clownishness.
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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.
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Not everyone is worth listening to.
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We should not be frightened by appearances.
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Booksellers are the most valuable destination for the lonely, given the numbers of books that were written because authors couldn't find anyone to talk to.
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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.
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Alcohol-inspired fights … are a reminder of the price we pay for our daily submission at the altars of prudence and order.
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There may be no good reason for things to be the way they are.
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True respectability stems not from the will of the majority but from proper reasoning.
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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.
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It is striking how much more seriously we are likely to be taken after we have been dead a few centuries.
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Philosophy had supplied Socrates with convictions in which he had been able to have rational, as opposed to hysterical, confidence when faced with disapproval.