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5b19fa8
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b twjh bh pyshrft `lm, bry nsn mdrn dygr twn `tqd bh khd wjwd nkhwhd dsht. drntyjh dyn w ymn bzychhy myshwd dr dst frTyh w khsny khh dr mrHl pyny zjr w drd z bymry `lj npdhyr qrr drnd.
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Alain de Botton |
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1b41ffd
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Though from a position of unrequited love they long to see their love returned, Marxists unconsciously prefer that their dreams remain in the realm of fantasy. Why should others think any better of them than they of themselves? Only so long as the loved one believes the Marxist to be more or less nothing, can the Marxist continue to believe the loved one to be more or less everything.
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Alain de Botton |
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f640078
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The arrogance of wanting to be loved had emerged only now it was unreciprocated--I was left alone with my desire, defenseless, beyond the law, shockingly crude in my demands: Love me! And for what reason? I had only the usual paltry, insufficient excuse: Because I love you . .
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Alain de Botton |
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cfcbc3f
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A marriage doesn't begin with a proposal, or even an initial meeting. It begins far earlier, when the idea of love is born, and more specifically the dream of a soulmate. Rabih
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Alain de Botton |
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5e41630
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It is difficult when reading the description of certain fictional characters not at the same time to imagine the real-life acquaintances who they most closely, if often unexpectedly, resemble.
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literature
philosophy-of-life
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Alain de Botton |
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641cd16
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In the mountains of truth you will never climb in vain: either you will get up higher today or you will exercise your strength so as to be able to get up higher tomorrow.
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Alain de Botton |
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13b770e
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Q: Did he think that love could last forever? A: Well, no, but the limits to eternity didn't lie specifically with love. They lay in the general difficulty of maintaining an appreciative relationship with anything or anyone that was always around.
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Alain de Botton |
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df3719e
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Valuable elements may be easier to experience in art and in anticipation than in reality. The anticipatory and artistic imaginations omit and compress, they cut away the periods of boredom and direct our attention to critical moments and, without either lying or embellishing, thus lend to life a vividness and a coherence that it may lack in the distracting woolliness of the present.
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Alain de Botton |
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c6a73d0
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Nature's kind trick is to make everything happen so slowly that we don't get as scared as we should.
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Alain de Botton |
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93b0387
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Though anger seems a pessimistic response to a situation, it is at root a symptom of hope: the hope that the world can be better than it is. The man who shouts every time he loses his house keys is betraying a beautiful but rash faith in a universe in which keys never go astray. The woman who grows furious every time a politician breaks an election promise reveals a precariously utopian belief that elections do not involve deceit. The news..
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optimism
hope
journalism
news
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Alain de Botton |
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63a988c
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What should worry us is not the number of people who oppose us, but how good their reasons are for doing so. We should therefore divert our attention away from the presence of unpopularity to the explanations for it. It may be frightening to hear that a high proportion of a community holds us to be wrong, but before abandoning our position, we should consider the method by which their conclusions have been reached. It is the soundness of th..
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Alain de Botton |
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bf17eb2
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Differ though we might with Christianity's view of what precisely our souls need, it is hard to discredit the provocative underlying thesis, which seems no less relevant in the secular realm than in the religious one--that we have within us a precious, childlike, vulnerable core which we should nourish and nurture on its turbulent journey through life.
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christianity
religion
life
nourishment
nurturing
needs
soul
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Alain de Botton |
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2b654ca
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It was as if a vital evolutionary advantage had been bestowed centuries ago on those members of the species who lived in a state of concern about what was to happen next. These ancestors might have failed to savour their experiences appropriately, but they had at least survived and shaped the character of their descendants, while their more focused siblings, at one with the moment and with the place where they stood, had met violent ends on..
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Alain de Botton |
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73c9139
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We might have been ready to offer sympathy, but in actuality there were stronger reasons to want to congratulate her for having found such a powerful motive to feel sad. We should have envied her for having located someone without whom she so firmly felt she could not survive, beyond the gate let along in a bare student bedroom in a suburb of Rio. If she had been able to view her situation from a sufficient distance, she might have been abl..
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Alain de Botton |
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fd40ebe
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There is, in the early period of love, a measure of sheer relief at being able, at last, to reveal so much of what needed to be kept hidden for the sake of propriety. We can admit to not being as respectable or as sober, as even-keeled or as 'normal', as society believes. We can be childish, imaginative, wild, hopeful, cynical, fragile and multiple - all of this our lover can understand and accept us for.
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Alain de Botton |
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321accc
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How quickly all the advantages of technological civilisation are wiped out by a domestic squabble. At the beginning of human history, as we struggled to light fires and to chisel fallen trees into rudimentary canoes, who could have predicted that long after we had managed to send men to the moon and aeroplanes to Australasia, we would still have trouble knowing how to tolerate ourselves, forgive our loved ones and apologise for our tantrums..
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Alain de Botton |
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966e0a8
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Rage is caused by a conviction, almost comic in its optimistic origins (however tragic in its effects), that a given frustration has not been written into the contract of life.
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Alain de Botton |
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c1882cc
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as the determinants of high status keep shifting, so, too, naturally, will the triggers of status anxiety be altered.
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status
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Alain de Botton |
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46fd189
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What we encounter in works of art and philosophy are objective versions of our own pains and struggles, evoked and defined in sound, language or image. Artists and philosophers not only show us what we have felt, they present our experiences more poignantly and intelligently than we have been able; they give shape to aspects of our lives that we recognise as our own, yet could never have understood so clearly on our own. They explain our co..
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self-knowledge
poetry
philosophy
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Alain de Botton |
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f2a6f40
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It follows that the more people we take to be our equals and compare ourselves to, the more people there will be to envy.
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Alain de Botton |
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11f994e
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the word "snobbery" came into use for the first time in England during 1820s. It was said to have derived from the habit of many Oxford and Cambridge colleges of writing sine nobilitate (without nobility) , or "s.nob", next to the names of the ordinary students on examinations lists in order to distinguish them from their aristocratic peers. In the word's earliest days, a snob was taken to mean someone without high status, but it quickly as..
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snob
snobbery
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Alain de Botton |
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d6b99db
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Insofar as we appreciate order, it is when we perceive it as being accompanied by complexity, when we feel that a variety of elements has been brought to order--that windows, doors and other details have been knitted into a scheme that manages to be at once regular and intricate. (p184)
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complexity
chaos
order
building
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Alain de Botton |
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d4fa769
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Our sense of identity is held captive by the judgements of those we live among.
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Alain de Botton |
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31290d5
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Belittling others is no pastime for those convinced of their own standing. There is terror behind haughtiness. It takes a punishing impression of our own inferiority to leave others feeling that they aren't good enough for us.
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Alain de Botton |
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73599aa
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Beneath the pleasure generated by the juxtaposition of order and complexity, we can identify the subsidiary architectural virtue of balance. Beauty is a likely outcome whenever architects skilfully mediate between any number of oppositions, including the old and the new, the natural and the man-made, the luxurious and the modest, and the masculine and the feminine.
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Alain de Botton |
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5bb077b
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A sharp decline in actual deprivation may, paradoxically, have been accompanied by an ongoing and even escalating sense of fear of deprivation.
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Alain de Botton |
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102bbb4
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Far from rejecting outright any hierarchy of success or failure, philosophy instead reconfigures the judging process, lending legitimacy to theidea that themainstream value system may unfairly consign some people to disgrace and others to respectability.
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status
values
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Alain de Botton |
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b0686b8
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Look not just at the Roman campagna, the pageantry of Venice, and the proud expression of Charles I astride his horse, but also have a look at the bowl on the sideboard, the dead fish in your kitchen, and the crusty bread loaves in the hall.
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Alain de Botton |
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f4560e3
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The kinds of purchases surveyed in the news generally sit well beyond necessity. In acquiring them, what we are after is rarely solely or even chiefly just material satisfaction; we are also guided by a deeper, often unconscious desire for some form of psychological transformation. We don't only want to things; we want to be through our ownership of them. Once we examine consumer behaviour with sufficient attention and generosity, it be..
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change
life
desires
purchases
material-goods
necessity
materialism
psychology
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Alain de Botton |
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ad11cda
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The value of a novel is not limited to its depiction of emotions and people akin to those in our own life; it stretches to an ability to describe these far better than we would have been able, to put a finger on perceptions that we recognize as our own, but could not have formulated on our own.
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Alain de Botton |
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1fc54e6
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For all the talk of education, modern societies neglect to examine by far the most influential means by which their populations are educated. Whatever happens in our classrooms, the more potent and ongoing kind of education takes place on the airwaves and on our screens. Cocooned in classrooms for only our first eighteen years or so, we effectively spend the rest of our lives under the tutelage of news entities which wield infinitely greate..
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Alain de Botton |
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7632518
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But the answer isn't just to intimidate people into consuming more 'serious' news; it is to push so-called serious outlets into learning to present important information in ways that can properly engage audiences. It is too easy to claim that serious things must be, and can almost afford to be, a bit boring. The challenge is to transcend the current dichotomy between those outlets that offer thoughtful but impotent instruction on the one ha..
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responsibility
presentation
sensationalism
interest
news
thoughtfulness
seriousness
engagement
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Alain de Botton |
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ebce50c
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The moral? That life can be a stranger substance than a cliche life, that goldfinches should occasionally do things differently from their parents, and that there are persuasive reasons for calling a loved one Plouplou, Missou, or poor little wolf.
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Alain de Botton |
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60b8e89
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A momentous but until then overlooked fact was making itself apparent: I had inadvertently brought myself with me to the island. It
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Alain de Botton |
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1be2ddd
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Love stories begin not when we fear someone may be unwilling to see us again, but when they decide they would have no objection to seeing us all the time; not when they have every opportunity to run away, but when they have exchanged solemn vows promising to hold us, and be held captive by us, for life. Our
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Alain de Botton |
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3677ef5
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We might imagine that the fear and insecurity of getting close to someone would happen only once, at the start of a relationship, and that anxieties couldn't possibly continue after two people had made some explicit commitments to one another, like marrying, securing a joint mortgage, buying a house, having a few children, and naming each other in their wills. Yet conquering distance and gaining assurances that we are needed aren't exercise..
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Alain de Botton |
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7f9fb9f
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We seem to be unable to resist overstating every aspect of ourselves: how long we are on the planet for, how much it matters what we achieve, how rare and unfair are our professional failures, how rife with misunderstandings are our relationships, how deep are our sorrows. Melodrama is individually always the order of the day.
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relationships
melodrama
significance
sorrows
self
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Alain de Botton |
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9ad3a04
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The essence of the charge made against the modern high-status ideal is that it is guilty of effecting a gigantic distortion of priorities, of elevating to the highest level of achievement a process of material accumulation that should instead be only one of many factors determining the direction of our lives under a more truthful, more broadly defined conception of ourselves.
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self-knowledge
status
priorities
materialism
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Alain de Botton |
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ad5dada
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A clean conscience is the preserve of those without sufficient imagination.
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Alain de Botton |
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4cea4ef
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Love reinvents our needs with unique speed. My impatience with the customs ritual indicated that Chloe, who I had not known existed a few hours ago, had already acquired the status of a craving. I felt I would die if I missed her outside - die for the sake of someone who had only entered my life at eleven thirty that morning.
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Alain de Botton |
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a5656e2
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It should not be Illiers-Combray that we visit: a genuine homage to Proust would be to look at our world through his eyes, not look at his world through our eyes.
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Alain de Botton |
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04df8b1
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A few centuries from now, the level of self-knowledge that our own age judges necessary to get married might be thought puzzling, if not outright barbaric. By then, a standard, wholly non-judgemental line of enquiry (appropriate even on a first date), to which everyone would be expected to have a tolerant, good-natured and non-defensive answer, would simply be: 'So in what ways are you mad?' Kirsten
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Alain de Botton |
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42fadde
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Secular society has been unfairly impoverished by the loss of an array of practices and themes which atheists typically find it impossible to live with because they seem too closely associated with, to quote Nietzsche's useful phrase, 'the bad odours of religion'. We have grown frightened of the word morality. We bridle at the thought of hearing a sermon. We flee from the idea that art should be uplifting or have an ethical mission. We don'..
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Alain de Botton |
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6bdecaf
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The second hugely seductive move is to signal that we view the other person with a mixture of tenderness and realism. It's often imagined that it'll be seductive to convey an air of adoration, to hint that the other strikes us as exceptionally attractive or accomplished. But surprisingly, it is deeply worrying to be obviously adored, because everyone, from the inside, knows very well that they don't deserve intense acclaim, are often disapp..
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admiration
seduction
intimacy
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Alain de Botton |