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Everyone wants a better life: very few of us want to be better people.

Alain de Botton

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
Cynics are – beneath it all – only idealists with awkwardly high standards.
ALAIN DE BOTTON

Awkward Beneath Cynic High Idealist Standard
Literature is the greatest reality simulator – a machine that puts you through infinitely more situations than you can ever directly witness.
ALAIN DE BOTTON

Direct Great Literature Machine Put Reality Simulator Witness
It looks like it’s wasting time, but literature is actually the ultimate time-saver – because it gives us access to a range of emotions and events that it would take you years, decades, millennia to try to experience directly.
ALAIN DE BOTTON

Access Emotion Like Literature Look Range Saver Time Ultimate Waste
Most of our childhood is stored not in photos, but in certain biscuits, lights of day, smells, textures of carpet.
ALAIN DE BOTTON

Biscuit Carpet Childhood Day Light Most Photo Smell Store Texture
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
Mental health: having enough safe places in your mind for your thoughts to settle.
ALAIN DE BOTTON

Emouhj Health Mental Place Safe Settle
Taking photographs can assuage the itch for possession sparked by the beauty of a place; our anxiety over losing a precious scene can decline with every click of the shutter.
ALAIN DE BOTTON

Anxiety Assuage Beauty Lose Photograph Place Possession Precious Sparkle Take
Being content is perhaps no less easy than playing the violin well: and requires no less practice.
ALAIN DE BOTTON

Content Less Perhaps Play Practice Require Well
The problem isn’t so much finding good ideas (there is no shortage) as embedding the ones we have into everyday practice.
ALAIN DE BOTTON

Embed Everyday Find Good Practice Problem
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
We will cease to be angry once we cease to be so hopeful.
ALAIN DE BOTTON

Angry Cease Hopeful Once
Literature deserves its prestige for one reason above all others – because it’s a tool to help us live and die with a little bit more wisdom, goodness, and sanity.
ALAIN DE BOTTON

Above Bit Deserve Help Literature Little Other Prestige Reason Tool
It wasn’t only fanatics and drunkards who began conversations with strangers in public.
ALAIN DE BOTTON

Began Conversation Drunkard Fall Humiliate Public Stranger
Endeavoring to purchase something we think beautiful may in fact be the most unimaginative way of dealing with the longing it excites in us, just as trying to sleep with someone may be the bluntest response to a feeling of love.
ALAIN DE BOTTON

Beautiful Deal Endeavor Feeling Long Love Purchase Response Something Think Way
We need a home in the psychological sense as much as we need one in the physical: to compensate for a vulnerability.
ALAIN DE BOTTON

Compensate Home Much Need Physical Psychological Vulnerability

Everyone wants a better life: very few of us want to be better people.

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Everyone wants a better life: very few of us want to be better people.

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