“Someone who has thought rationally and deeply about how the body works is likely to arrive at better ideas about how to be healthy than someone who has followed a hunch. Medicine presupposes a hierarchy between the confusion the layperson will be in about what is wrong with him, and the more accurate knowledge available to doctors reasoning logically. … At the heart of Epicureanism is the thought that we are as bad at answering the question “What will make me happy?” as “What will make me healthy?””

— Alain de Botton, book The Consolations of Philosophy

… Our souls do not spell out their troubles.
Source: The Consolations of Philosophy (2000), pp. 53-54.

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Alain de Botton146

Swiss writer 1969

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