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One kind of good book should leave you asking: how did the author know that about me?

Alain de Botton

A danger of travel is that we see things at the wrong time, before we have had a chance to build up the necessary receptivity and when new information is therefore as useless and fugitive as necklace beads without a connecting chain.
ALAIN DE BOTTON

Build Chain Change Connect Danger Information Necessary Receptivity See Thing Travel
The mind does most of its best thinking when we aren’t there. The answers are there in the morning.
ALAIN DE BOTTON

Answer Best Mind Morning Think
There is always the option of being emotionally lazy, that is, of quoting.
ALAIN DE BOTTON

Always Emotion Lazy Option Quote
Our greatest furies spring from events which violate our sense of the ground of our existence.
ALAIN DE BOTTON

Event Existence Fury Great Ground Sense Spring Violate
You have to be quite heavily invested in someone to do them the honour of telling them you’re annoyed with them.
ALAIN DE BOTTON

Annoy Heavily Honor Invest Quite Someone Tell
Travel agents would be wiser to ask us what we hope to change about our lives rather than simply where we wish to go.
ALAIN DE BOTTON

Agent Ask Change Hope Simply Travel Wiser Wish
Curiosity might be pictured as being made up of chains of small questions extending outwards, sometimes over huge distances, from a central hub composed of a few blunt, large questions.
ALAIN DE BOTTON

Curiosity Distance Extend Huge Outward Picture Question Small Some Time
In the gap between who we wish one day to be and who we are at present, must come pain, anxiety, envy and humiliation.
ALAIN DE BOTTON

Anxiety Between Day Gap Humiliation One Present Wish
It is perhaps when our lives are at their most problematic that we are likely to be most receptive to beautiful things.
ALAIN DE BOTTON

Beautiful Like Live Most Perhaps Problematic Receptive Thing
I learnt to stop fantasising about the perfect job or the perfect relationship because that can actually be an excuse for not living.
ALAIN DE BOTTON

Actual Excuse Fantasies Job Learn Live Perfect Relationship
There is a longing for a return to a time without the need for choices, free of the regret at the inevitable loss that all choice (however wonderful) has entailed.
ALAIN DE BOTTON

Choice Inevitable Long Loss Need Regret Return Time
Work is most fulfilling when you’re at the comfortable, exciting edge of not quite knowing what you are doing.
ALAIN DE BOTTON

Comfortable Do Edge Excite Fulfill Quite Work
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
People only get really interesting when they start to rattle the bars of their cages.
ALAIN DE BOTTON

Bar Cage Interest People Rattle Really Start
After 40 (old age for most of man’s history), one should strive to be more or less packed and ready to go were the end call to come.
ALAIN DE BOTTON

Age End Less Man More Most Old Pack Should Strive
It is striking how much more seriously we are likely to be taken after we have been dead a few centuries.
ALAIN DE BOTTON

Century Dead Like Serious Strike Taken

One kind of good book should leave you asking: how did the author know that about me?

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One kind of good book should leave you asking: how did the author know that about me?

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