A virtuous, ordinary life, striving for wisdom but never far from folly, is achievement enough.
ALAIN DE BOTTONAs we write, so we build: to keep a record of what matters to us.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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The greatest works of art speak to us without knowing us.
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Most good thinking has its origin in fear.
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Serious journalists often imagine society is adrift because people don’t know certain things.
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What kills us isn’t one big thing, but thousands of tiny obligations we can’t turn down for fear of disappointing others.
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One’s doing well if age improves even slightly one’s capacity to hold on to that vital truism: “This too shall pass.
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The largest part of what we call ‘personality’ is determined by how we’ve opted to defend ourselves against anxiety and sadness”.
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The fear of saying something stupid (which stupid people never have) has censored far more good ideas than bad ones.
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Feeling lost, crazy and desperate belongs to a good life as much as optimism, certainty and reason.
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to design means forcing ourselves to unlearn what we believe we already know, patiently to take apart the mechanisms behind our reflexes and to acknowledge the mystery and stupefying complexity of everyday gestures like switching off a light of turning on a tap
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We need a refuge to shore up our states of mind, because so much of the world is opposed to our allegiances. We need our rooms to align us to desirable versions of ourselves and to keep alive the important, evanescent sides of us.
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There may be significant things to learn about people by looking at what annoys them most.
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Intuition is unconscious accumulated experience informing judgement in real time.
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Unnatural to expect that learning to be happy should be any easier than, say, learning to play the violin or require any less practice.
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As victims of hurt, we frequently don’t bring up what ails us, because so many wounds look absurd in the light of day.
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Only by declaring a book completely finished can one start to see how much remains to be done on it.
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What is a snob? A snob is anybody who takes a small part of you and uses that to come to a complete vision of who you are. That is snobbery.
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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.
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It’s perhaps easier now than ever before to make a good living; it’s perhaps harder than ever before to stay calm, to be free of career anxiety.
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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.
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The mind does most of its best thinking when we aren’t there. The answers are there in the morning.
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Because the rhythm of conversation makes no allowance for dead periods, because the presence of others calls for continuous responses, we are left to regret the inanity of what we say, and the missed opportunity of what we do not.
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We often lose our tempers not with those who are actually to blame; just with those who love us enough to forgive us our foul moods.
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Most of our childhood is stored not in photos, but in certain biscuits, lights of day, smells, textures of carpet.
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There’s a whole category of people who miss out by not allowing themselves to be weird enough.
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Must being in love always mean being in pain?
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A successful work will draw out the features capable of exciting a sense of beauty and interest in the spectator.
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