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It is by finding out what something is not that one comes closest to understanding what it is.

Alain de Botton

Forgiveness requires a sense that bad behaviour is a sign of suffering rather than malice.
ALAIN DE BOTTON

Behaviour Forgive Malice Require Sense Sign Suffer
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.
ALAIN DE BOTTON

Anyone Bookseller Destination Most Number Talk Valuable
As adults, we try to develop the character traits that would have rescued our parents.
ALAIN DE BOTTON

Adult Character Develop Parent Rescue Trait
The difference between hope and despair is a different way of telling stories from the same facts.
ALAIN DE BOTTON

Badly Between Despair Difference Different Story Tell Way
You need a long hard day’s work to reveal the logic of the craving for very bad tv and alcohol.
ALAIN DE BOTTON

Alcohol Day Hard Logic Long Need Reveal
It seems that most of us could benefit from a brush with a near-fatal disaster to help us recognise the important things that we are too defeated or embittered to recognise from day to day.
ALAIN DE BOTTON

Benefit Brush Disaster Fatal Help Important Recognise Seem Thing
When Proust urges us to evaluate the world properly, he repeatedly reminds us of the value of modest scenes.
ALAIN DE BOTTON

Evaluate Modest Property Repeatedly Scene Urge Value World
It’s as though either you accept [religious] doctrine and then you can have all the nice stuff, or you reject the doctrine and you’re living in some kind of spiritual wasteland under the guidance of CNN and Walmart.
ALAIN DE BOTTON

Accept Afford Desire Either Grow Poorer Possess Relative Resource Rich Something Time
The most attractive are not those who allow us to kiss them at once [we soon feel ungrateful] or those who never allow us to kiss them [we soon forget them], but those who coyly lead us between the two extremes.
ALAIN DE BOTTON

Allow Attractive Most Once Ungrateful
There is real danger of a disconnect between what’s on your business card and who you are deep inside, and it’s not a disconnect that the world is ready to be patient with.
ALAIN DE BOTTON

Business Card Danger Dep Disconnect Inside
A ‘good job’ can be both practically attractive while still not good enough to devote your entire life to.
ALAIN DE BOTTON

Devote Enough Entire Good Job Life Practically
In their different ways, art and philosophy help us, in Schopenhauer’s words, to turn pain into knowledge.
ALAIN DE BOTTON

Art Different Help Knowledge Pain People Philosophy Way Word
It’s hard loving those who don’t much like themselves: “If you’re so great, why would you think I’m so great.
ALAIN DE BOTTON

Great Hate Live Long Themselves
The more closely we analyze what we consider ‘sexy,’ the more clearly we will understand that eroticism is the feeling of excitement we experience at finding another human being who shares our values and our sense of the meaning of existence.
ALAIN DE BOTTON

Analyze Clearly Closely Consider Eroticism Excitement Feel More Understand
I think people want to get married to end their emotional uncertainty. In a way, they want to end powerful feelings, or certainly the negative ones.
ALAIN DE BOTTON

Emotional End Feeling Married People Powerful Uncertain
Out of the millions of people we live among, most of whom we habitually ignore and are ignored by in turn, there are always a few that hold hostage our capacity for happiness, whom we could recognize by their smell alone and whom we would rather die than be without.
ALAIN DE BOTTON

Always Among Habitat Ignore Million People Turn

It is by finding out what something is not that one comes closest to understanding what it is.

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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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