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fc5d78c
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It is the most ambitious and driven among us who are the most sorely in need of having our reckless hopes dampened through immersive dousings in the darkness which religions have explored. This is a particular priority for secular Americans, perhaps the most anxious and disappointed people on earth, for their nation infuses them with the most extreme hopes about what they may be able to achieve in their working lives and relationships.
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optimism
hope
anxiety
drive
americans
atheism
pessimism
disappointment
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Alain de Botton |
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35448ef
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Try, before taking off for distant hemispheres to notice what we have already seen.
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alain de botton |
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cb01293
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In literature, too, we admire prose in which a small and astutely arranged set of words has been constructed to carry a large consignment of ideas. 'We all have strength enough to bear the misfortunes of others,' writes La Rochefoucauld in an aphorism which transports us with an energy and exactitude comparable to that of Maillard bridge. The Swiss engineer reduces the number of supports just as the French writer compacts into a single line..
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words
literature
writing
engineering
simplicity
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Alain de Botton |
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89a15b8
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There is an Arabic saying that the soul travels at the pace of a camel. While most of us are led by the strict demands of timetables and diaries, our soul, the seat of the heart, trails nostalgically behind, burdened by the weight of memory. If every love affair adds a certain weight to the camel's load, then we can expect the soul to slow according to the significance of love's burden.
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Alain de Botton |
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03be017
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However powerful our technology and complex our corporations, the most remarkable feature of the modern working world may in the end be internal, consisting in an aspect of our mentalities: in the widely held belief that our work should make us happy. All societies have had work at their centre; ours is the first to suggest that it could be something more than a punishment or a penance. Ours is the first to imply that we should seek to work..
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work
happiness
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Alain de Botton |
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9dd950e
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Whatever the benefits of prolific and convenient air travel, we may curse it for its smooth subversion of our attempts to use journeys to make lasting changes in our lives.
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Alain de Botton |
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0140d91
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Whatever modern democracies may tell themselves about their commitment to free speech and to diversity of opinion, the values of a given society will uncannily match those of whichever organizations have the scale to pay for runs of thirty-second slots around the nightly news bulletin.
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money
democracies
organizations
opinion
free-speech
values
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Alain de Botton |
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b2dcb04
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To a shameful extent, the charm of marriage boils down to how unpleasant it is to be alone. This isn't necessarily our fault as individuals. Society as a whole appears determined to render the single state as nettlesome and depressing as possible: once the freewheeling days of school and university are over, company and warmth become dispiritingly hard to find; social life starts to revolve oppressively around couples; there's no one left t..
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marriage
love
social-life
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Alain de Botton |
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3058832
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Seeing through people is so easy, and it gets you nowhere,' remarked Elias Canetti, suggesting how effortlessly and yet how uselessly we can find fault with others.
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Alain de Botton |
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7362821
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According to one influential wing of modern secular society there are few more disreputable fates than to end up being 'like everyone else' for 'everyone else' is a category that comprises the mediocre and the conformist, the boring and the suburban. The goal of all right-thinking people should be to mark themselves off from the crowd and 'stand out' in whatever way their talents allow.
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Alain de Botton |
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1795915
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A feeling of beauty is a sign that we have come upon a material articulation of certain of our ideas of a good life.
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Alain de Botton |
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cf11e01
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We pick our friends not only because they are kind and enjoyable company, but also, perhaps more importantly, because they understand us for who we think we are.
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Alain de Botton |
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12a9e13
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But if the beginnings of love and amorous politics are equally rosy, then the ends are often equally bloody. We're familiar with political love that ends in tyranny, where a ruler's firm conviction that he has the true interests of his nation at heart ends up lending him the confidence to murder without qualms (and 'for their own good') all who disagree with him. Romantic lovers are similarly inclined to vent their frustration on dissenters..
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Alain de Botton |
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e32ea64
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Art was the very antithesis of crass moralism.
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moralism
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Alain de Botton |
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a860883
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An urgent wish is no guarantor of a sound solution.
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Alain de Botton |
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bf7ae96
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it seems impossible to talk of love and letting live, and if we are left to live, we are not usually loved.
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Alain de Botton |
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ceed72d
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The motor of our ingenuity is the question 'Does it have to be like this?', from which arise political reforms, scientific developments, improved relationships, better books.
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Alain de Botton |
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e29a9a5
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history tells us of the case of a man living under the peculiar delusion that he was a fried egg. Quite how or when this idea had entered his head, no one knew, but he now refused to sit down anywhere for fear that he would 'break himself' and 'spill the yolk'. His doctors tried sedatives and other drugs to appease his fears, but nothing seemed to work. Finally, one of them made the effort to enter the mind of the deluded patient and sugges..
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Alain de Botton |
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7099151
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Confident that cast-iron walls separate our nature and situation from theirs, comfortable in the well-broken-in saddle of our high horse, we have exchanged our capacity to be tolerant for detachment and derision. It is the tragedian's task, then, to force us to confront an almost unbearable truth: every folly or myopia of which any human being in history has been guilty may be traced back to some aspect of our collective nature. Because we ..
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Alain De Botton |
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eac940d
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But we would do well to meditate daily, rather as the religious do on their God, on the 9.5 trillion kilometres which comprise a single light year, or perhaps on the luminosity of the largest known star in our galaxy, Eta Carinae, 7,500 light years distant, 400 times the size of the sun and 4 million times as bright. We should punctuate our calendars with celebrations in honour of VY Canis Majoris, a red hypergiant in the constellation Cani..
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Alain de Botton |
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56548e3
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What a peculiar civilisation this was: inordinately rich, yet inclined to accrue its wealth through the sale of some astonishingly small and only distantly meaningful things, a civilisation torn and unable sensibly to adjudicate between the worthwhile ends to which money might be put and the often morally trivial and destructive mechanisms of its generation.
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money
wealth
meaning
triviality
material-goods
things
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Alain de Botton |
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59671d2
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The travails of being an employee include not only uncertainty about the duration of one's employment, but also the humiliation of many working practices and dynamics. With most businesses shaped like pyramids, in which a wide base of employees gives way to a narrow tip of managers, the question of who will be rewarded - and who left behind - typically develops into one of the most oppressive of the workplace, and one which, like all anxiet..
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status-anxiety
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Alain de Botton |
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34290fe
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We take this idea of love (being loved, rather than loving) with us into adulthood. Grown up, we hope for a re-creation of what it felt like to be ministered to and indulged. In a secret corner of our mind, we picture a lover who will anticipate our needs, read our hearts, act selflessly, and make everything better. It sounds "romantic," yet it is a blueprint for disaster."
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romanticism
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Alain de Botton |
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311d2fc
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At the top of the slope on the perimeter of the site, overlooking six lanes of motorway, is a diner frequented by lorry drivers who have either just unloaded or or are waiting to pick up their cargo. Anyone nursing a disappointment with domestic life would find relief in this tiled, brightly lit cafeteria with its smells of fries and petrol, for it has the reassuring feel of a place where everyone is just passing through--and which therefor..
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travel
cafeteria
diner
motorways
anonymity
disappointment
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Alain de Botton |
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7bb7b2e
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We charm by coincidence rather than design.
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Alain de Botton |
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0410667
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Our "ego" or self-conception could be pictured as a leaking balloon, forever requiring the helium of external love to remain inflated, and ever vulnerable to the smallest pinpricks of neglect." --
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Alain de Botton |
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c821ca5
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Reading Proust nearly silenced Virginia Woolf. She loved his novel, but loved it rather too much. There wasn't enough wrong with it--a crushing recognition when one considers Walter Benjamin's assessment of why people become writers: because they are unable to find a book already written that they are completely happy with. And
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Alain de Botton |
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2ebb227
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Nothing is erotic that isn't also, with the wrong person, revolting, which is precisely what makes erotic moments so intense: at the precise juncture where disgust could be at its height, we find only welcome and permission.
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Alain de Botton |
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f55046d
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Academic masochism reflects a metaphysical prejudice that the truth should be a hard-won treasure, that what is read or learnt easily must therefore be flighty and inconsequential. The truth should be like a mount to be scaled, it is dangerous, obscure and demanding. Under the light of the library reading room, the academics' motto reads: the more a text makes me suffer, the truer it must be.
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books
love
truth
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Alain de Botton |
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ba244bb
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The true aspiration of art should be to reduce the need for it. It is not that we should one day lose our devotion to the things that art addresses: beauty, depth of meaning, good relationships, the appreciation of nature, recognition of the shortness of life, empathy, compassion, and so on. Rather, having imbibed the ideals that art displays, we should fight to attain in reality the things art merely symbolises, however graciously and inte..
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audiences
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Alain de Botton |
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b9d1fa2
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Blessed with riches and possibilities far beyond anything imagined by ancestors who tilled the unpredictable soil of medieval Europe, modern populations have nonetheless shown a remarkable capacity to feel that neither who they are nor what they have is quite enough.
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wealth
modern-age
dissatisfaction
possibilities
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Alain de Botton |
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88ead26
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I was here, I saw this and it mattered to me.
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Alain de Botton |
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abc0cff
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What makes people good communicators is, in essence, an ability not to be fazed by the more problematic or offbeat aspects of their own characters. They can contemplate their anger, their sexuality, and their unpopular, awkward, or unfashionable opinions without losing confidence or collapsing into self-disgust. They can speak clearly because they have managed to develop a priceless sense of their own acceptability. They like themselves wel..
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self-knowledge
family
communicators
self-acceptance
communication
parenting
parents
children
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Alain de Botton |
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dd7faff
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We owe it to the fields that our houses will not be the inferiors of the virgin land they have replaced. We owe it to the worms and the trees that the building we cover them with will stand as promises of the highest and most intelligent kinds of happiness.
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nature
homes
houses
land
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Alain de Botton |
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35d810e
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Partially undermining the manufacturer's ability to assert that its work constituted a meaningful contribution to mankind was the frivolous way in which it went about marketing its products. Grief was the only rational response to the news that an employee had spent three months devising a supermarket promotion based on an offer of free stickers of cartoon characters called the Fimbles. Why had the grown-ups so churlishly abdicated their re..
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meaning
work
death
products
promotions
business
marketing
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Alain de Botton |
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f6e2be8
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Solitary though we may have become, we haven't of course given up all hope of forming relationships. In the lonely canyons of the modern city, there is no more honoured emotion than love. However, this is not the love of which religions speak, not the expansive, universal brotherhood of mankind; it is a more jealous, restricted and ultimately meaner variety. It is a romantic love which sends us on a maniacal quest for a single person with w..
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modernity
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Alain de Botton |
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4bc65a5
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A danger of travel is that we may see things at the wrong time, before we have had an opportunity to build up the necessary receptivity, so that new information is as useless and fugitive as necklace beads without a connecting chain.
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Alain de Botton |
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cc9b4c3
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The study of maps and the perusal of travel books aroused in me a secret fascination that was at times almost irresistible.
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travel
scientists
explorer
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Alain de Botton |
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6be6f19
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yn nshnh hwshmndy st khh bpdhyrym m hm bh lTf w mHbt, thbt w rhnmyy nyz drym drst mthl anchh khwdkhn m nyz drnd.
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Alain de Botton |
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e00562d
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It isn't normal to know what we want. It is a rare and difficult psychological achievement.
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Alain de Botton |
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30eabd6
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We incline towards feelings of isolation and persecution because we have an unrealistic sense of how much difficulty is normal. We panic too easily, as we misjudge the meaning of our troubles. We are lonely - not that we have no one to talk to, but because those around us can't appreciate our travails with sufficient depth, honesty and patience. This is partly because the ways we show the pain of our choppy relationships, envy or unfulfille..
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Alain de Botton |
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795b4ea
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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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Alain de Botton |
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5e07b8d
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Is it really her I love, I thought to myself as I looked again at Chloe reading on the sofa across the room, or simply an idea that collects itself around her mouth, her eyes, her face? In using her face as a guide to her soul, was I not perhaps guilty of mistaken metonymy, whereby an attribute of an entity is substituted for the entity itself (the crown for the monarchy, the wheel for the car, the White House for the US government, Chloe's..
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Alain de Botton |
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8d944f5
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The most significant fact of political life, which almost no news organization will dare to acknowledge - because it would at a stroke exclude half of its speculations and disappointments - is that in some key areas of politics, nothing can be achieved very quickly by any one person or party; it would be impossible for anyone - not simply this fool or that group of cretins - to change matters at a pace that would flatter the expectations of..
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Alain de Botton |