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9851c63
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With no attempt there can be no failure; with no failure no humiliation. So our self-esteem in this world depends entirely on what we back ourselves to be and do. It is determined by the ratio of our actualities to our supposed potentialities.
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Alain de Botton |
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d1d787e
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Although it often struggles to be heard in respectable circles, there is an alternative to the Christian-Romantic tenet that sex and love should always be inseparable. The libertine position denies any inherent or logical link between loving someone and needing to be unfailingly sexually loyal to them. It proposes that it can be entirely natural and even healthy for partners in a couple occasionally to have sex with strangers for whom they ..
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Alain de Botton |
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190f752
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In an ideal world, marriage vows would be entirely rewritten. At the alter, a couple would speak thus: "We accept not to panic when, some years from now, what we are doing today will seem like the worst decision of our lives. Yet we promise not to look around, either, for we accept that there cannot be better options out there. Everyone is always impossible. We are a demented species." After the solemn repetition of the last sentence by the..
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Alain de Botton |
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c20e445
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Romanticism is a philosophy of intuitive agreement. In real love, there is no need tiresomely to articulate or spell things out. When two people belong together, there is simply - at long last - a wondrous reciprocal feeling that both parties see the world in precisely the same way.
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Alain de Botton |
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651dd23
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Why be seduced by something as small as a front door in another country? Why fall in love with a place because it has trams and its people seldom have curtains in their homes? However absurd the intense reactions provoked by such small (and mute) foreign elements may seem, the pattern is at least familiar from our personal lives. There, too, we may find ourselves anchoring emotions of love on the way a person butters his or her bread, or re..
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travel
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Alain de Botton |
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f5cefa9
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We can conclude from this that we are drawn to call something beautiful whenever we detect that it contains in a concentrated form those qualities in which we personally, or our societies more generally, are deficient. We respect a style which can move us away from what we fear and towards what we crave: a style which carries the correct dosage of our missing virtues.
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Alain de Botton |
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06df67b
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What if pleasure and displeasure were so tied together that whoever wanted to have as much as possible of one must also have as much as possible of the other ... you have the choice: either as little displeasure as possible, painlessness in brief ... or as much displeasure as possible as the price for the growth of an abundance of subtle pleasures and joys that have rarely been relished yet? If you decide for the former and desire to dimini..
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Alain de Botton |
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55064f4
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It follows that the balance we approve of in architecture, and which we anoint with the word 'beautiful', alludes to a state that, on a psychological level, we can describe as mental health or happiness. Like buildings, we, too, contain opposites which can be more or less successfully handled.
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Alain de Botton |
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2078530
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They therefore have no opportunity to suffer the interval between desire and gratification which the less privileged endure, and which, for all its apparent unpleasantness, has the incalculable benefit of allowing people to know and fall deeply in love with paintings in Dresden, hats, dressing gowns, and someone who isn't free this evening.
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Alain de Botton |
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16eec07
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Unrequited love may be painful, but it is safely painful, because it does not involve inflicting damage on anyone but oneself, a private pain that is as bittersweet as it is self-induced. But as soon as love is reciprocated, one must be prepared to give up the passivity of simply hurt to take on the responsibility of perpetrating hurt oneself.
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Alain de Botton |
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61a9e84
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We should forever forswear the masochistic process wherein we seek another's approval before we have even asked ourselves whether that person's views deserve to be listened to.
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Alain de Botton |
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5e2d0de
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We can see beauty well enough just by opening our eyes, but how long this beauty will survive in memory depends on how intentionally we have apprehended it.
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Alain de Botton |
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38e9d52
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Our best chance of contentment lies in taking up the wisdom offered to us in coded form through our coughs, allergies, social gaffes, and emotional betrayals, and avoid the ingratitude of those who blame the peas, the bores, the time, and the weather.
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Alain de Botton |
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e09118a
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the greater part of our anxieties stems from an exaggerated sense of the importance of our own projects and concerns. We are tortured by our ideals and by a punishingly high-minded sense of the gravity of what we are doing.
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Alain de Botton |
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77136d9
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Lovers cannot remain philosophers for long, they should give way to the religious impulse, which is to believe and have faith, as opposed to the philosophic impulse, which is to doubt & inquire. They should prefer the risk of being wrong and in love to being in doubt and without love.
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Alain de Botton |
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5e064ab
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When you feel sad, you are participating in a venerable experience, to which I, this monument, am dedicated. Your sense of loss and disappointment, of frustrated hopes and grief at your own inadequacy, elevate you to serious company. Do not ignore of throw away your grief
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self-help
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Alain de Botton |
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32bd2b1
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All lives are difficult; what makes some of them fulfilled as well is the manner in which pains have been met. Every pain is an indistinct signal that something is wrong, which may engender either a good or bad result depending on the sagacity and strength of mind of the sufferer. Anxiety may precipitate panic, or an accurate analysis of what is amiss. A sense of injustice may lead to murder, or to a ground-breaking work of economic theory...
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Alain de Botton |
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aca55da
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News organizations are coy about admitting that what they present us with each day are minuscule extracts of narratives whose true shape and logic can generally only emerge from a perspective of months or even years -- and that it would hence often be wiser to hear the story in chapters rather than snatched sentences. They are institutionally committed to implying that it is inevitably better to have a shaky and partial grasp of a subject t..
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Alain de Botton |
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48e4969
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There are two ways to make a man richer, reasoned Rousseau: give him more money or curb his desires.
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Alain de Botton |
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a70e830
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Good listeners are no less rare or important than good communicators. Here, too, an unusual degree of confidence is the key--a capacity not to be thrown off course by, or buckle under the weight of, information that may deeply challenge certain settled assumptions. Good listeners are unfussy about the chaos which others may for a time create in their minds; they've been there before and know that everything can eventually be set back in its..
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Alain de Botton |
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601d067
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Our bodies smell, ache, sag, pulse, throb and age. They force us to fart and burp, and to abandon sensible plans in order to lie in bed with people, sweating and letting out intense sounds reminiscent of coyotes calling out to one another across the barren wastes of the American deserts. Our bodies hold our minds hostage to their whims and rhythms.
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Alain de Botton |
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d9d5b52
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chTwr mytwn Gm r nshn dd bdwn ynkhh tmmy adm r frgyrd?
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Alain de Botton |
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8009af8
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The incident emphasizes once more that beauty is something to be found, rather than passively encountered, that it requires us to pick up on certain details, to identify the whiteness of a cotton dress, the reflection of the sea on the hull of a yacht, or the contrast between the color of a jockey's coat and his face.
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Alain de Botton |
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d395bc0
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Rather than struggling to become bigger fish, we might concentrate our energies on finding smaller ponds or smaller species to swim with, so our own size will trouble us less.
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Alain de Botton |
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079b2be
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Anyone who urgently needs us deserves, in the true book of love, to be our friend.
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empathy
friendship
love
support
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Alain de Botton |
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b01d67f
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There is the old joke made by the Marx who laughed about not deigning to belong to a club that would accept someone like him as a member, a truth as appropriate in love as it is in club membership.
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Alain de Botton |
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5b48789
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Perfectiunea exercita o anume tiranie, aproape o epuizare, ceva care neaga privitorului un rol in propria creatie si care se impune cu tot dogmatismul unei afirmatii lipsite de ambiguitate. Adevarata frumusete nu poate fi masurata pentru ca fluctueaza, exosta numai cateva unghiuri din care poate fi vazuta si nici atunci in orice luminp si in orice moment. Flirteaza periculos cu uratenia, isi asuma riscuri, nu se aliniaza confortabil cu regu..
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eseuri-de-îndrăgostit
frumusețe
perfecțiune
on-love
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Alain de Botton |
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1fcfa5b
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A definition of beauty that more accurately summed up my feelings for Chloe was delivered by Stendhal. "Beauty is the promise of happiness," he wrote, pointing to the way Chloe's face alluded to qualities I identified with a good life: there was humor in her nose, her freckles spoke of innocence, and her teeth suggested a casual, cheeky disregard for convention."
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Alain de Botton |
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59e5d52
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The beginning of revolutions is psychologically strikingly akin to that of certain relationships: the stress on unity, the sense of omnipotence, the desire to eliminate secrets (with the fear of the opposite soon leading to lover's paranoia and the creation of a secret police).
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Alain de Botton |
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8d36ca9
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wisdom lies in correctly discerning where we are free to mould reality according to our wishes and where we must accept the unalterable with tranquillity. The
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Alain de Botton |
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7a1e87e
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W]e all incline in astonishingly personal ways to idiocy and spite
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Alain de Botton |
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0486ff2
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In the immediate vicinity, there might well be stability and peace. In the garden, a breeze may be swaying the branches of the plum tree and dust may slowly be gathering on the bookshelves in the living room. But we are aware that such serenity does not do justice to the chaotic and violent fundamentals of existence and hence, after a time, it has a a habit of growing worrisome in its own way.
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violence
concern
serenity
chaos
news
worry
peace
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Alain de Botton |
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dbd968c
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doubts only inflame desire. As Rabih has realized, the most attractive people aren't those who accept him right away (he doubts their judgement) or those who never give him a chance (he grows to resent their indifference) but rather those who, for unfathomable reasons - perhaps a competing romantic entanglement or a cautious nature, a physical predicament or a psychological inhibition, a religious commitment or a political objection - leave..
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Alain de Botton |
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1811fdf
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E surprinzator cat de des respingerea in dragoste este exprimata in limbajul moralitatii, limbajul aceea ce e corect si ce nu, a ceea ce e bun si ce e rau, ca si cand a respinge sau a nu respinge, a iubi sau a nu iubi este ceva ce apartine in mod natural unei ramuri a eticii. E surprinzator cat de des cel care respinge este etichetat ca fiind rau, iar cel respins ajunge sa intruchipeze binele.
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Alain de Botton |
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d690fa9
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Adulthood involves learning to conclusively bury a great many of our hopes.
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Alain de Botton |
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eefc2ef
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The most uncouth of our afflictions is to despise our being. Rather than trying to cut ourselves in two, we should cease waging civil war on our perplexing physical envelopes and learn to accept them as unalterable facts of our condition; neither so terrible, nor so humiliating.
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Alain de Botton |
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1a8c344
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If we are inclined to forget how much there is in the world besides that which we anticipate, then works of art are perhaps a little to blame, for in them we find the same process of simplification or selection at work as in the imagination.
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Alain de Botton |
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db17df6
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Our capacity to draw happiness from aesthetic objects or material goods in fact seems critically dependent on our first satisfying a more important range of emotional or psychological needs, among them the need for understanding, for love, expression and respect.
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Alain de Botton |
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f86cb6f
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Then, in a further challenge to reality and because of the way she felt towards them, Chloe would (with the grin of a six-year-old child facing the power of its hostile impulses) tell her parents she could kill them by shutting her eyes and never thinking of them again - a plan which no doubt elicit a profoundly unphilosophical response from the parents.
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Alain de Botton |
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15b1c14
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We do our sulking lovers the greatest possible favor when we are able to regard their tantrums as we would those of an infant. We are so alive to the idea that it's patronizing to be thought of as younger than we are; we forget that it is also, at times, the greatest privilege for someone to look beyond our adult self in order to engage with--and forgive--the disappointed, furious, inarticulate child within.
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Alain de Botton |
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872f3d0
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Ruskin's interest in beauty and in its possession led him to five central conclusions. First, beauty was the result of a number of complex factors that affected the mind both psychologically and visually. Second, humans had an innate tendency to respond to beauty and to desire to possess it. Third, there were many lower expressions of this desire for possession (including, as we have seen, buying souvenirs and carpets, carving one's name on..
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Alain de Botton |
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3e55823
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The new pornography would combine sexual excitement with an interest in other human ideals. The usual animalistic categories and hackneyed plots, replete with stock characters seemingly incapable of coherent speech, would give way to pornographic images and scenarios based aorund such qualities as intelligence (showing people reading or wandering the stacks in libraries), kindness (people performing oral sex on one another with an air of sw..
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Alain de Botton |
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034ba2b
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We start trying to be wise when we realize that we are not born knowing how to live, but that life is a skill that has to be acquired,
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Alain de Botton |
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6de8b5d
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In Montaigne's redrawn portrait of the adequate, semi-rational human being, it is possible to speak no Greek, fart, change one's mind after a meal, get bored with books, know none of the ancient philosophers and mistake Scipios. A virtuous, ordinary life, striving for wisdom but never far from folly, is achievement enough.
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Alain de Botton |