Work is most fulfilling when you’re at the comfortable, exciting edge of not quite knowing what you are doing.
ALAIN DE BOTTONMan seems merely dust postponed: the sublime as an encounter – pleasurable, intoxicating, even – with human weakness in the face of strength, age and size of the universe.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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Only as we mature does affection begin to depend on achievement.
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When you look at the Moon, you think, ‘I’m really small. What are my problems?’ It sets things into perspective. We should all look at the Moon a bit more often.
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When Proust urges us to evaluate the world properly, he repeatedly reminds us of the value of modest scenes.
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Our greatest furies spring from events which violate our sense of the ground of our existence.
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How do the stems connect to the roots?’ ‘Where is the mist coming from?’ ‘Why does one tree seem darker than another?’ These questions are implicitly asked and answered in the process of sketching.
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Getting to the top has an unfortunate tendency to persuade people that the system is OK after all.
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Travel agents would be wiser to ask us what we hope to change about our lives rather than simply where we wish to go.
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There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life.
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As an atheist, I think there are lots of things religions get up to which are of value to non-believers – and one of those things is trying to be a bit better than we normally manage to be.
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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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Intuition is unconscious accumulated experience informing judgement in real time.
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The company of certain people may excite our generosity and sensitivity, while that of others awakens our competitiveness and envy.
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I passionately believe that’s it’s not just what you say that counts, it’s also how you say it – that the success of your argument critically depends on your manner of presenting it.
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In the gap between who we wish one day to be and who we are at present, must come pain, anxiety, envy and humiliation.
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Art holds out the promise of inner wholeness.
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Good books put a finger on emotions that are deeply our own – but that we could never have described on our own.
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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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The finest proof of our loyalty toward one another was our monstrous disloyalties towards everyone else.
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The greatest difficulty of Travel is that one is forced to take oneself along.
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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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Most of what makes a book ‘good’ is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.
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Every adult life could be said to be defined by two great love stories: the story of our quest for sexual love and the story of our quest for love from the world.
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The only way to be happy is to realise how much depends on how you look at things
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A ‘good job’ can be both practically attractive while still not good enough to devote your entire life to.
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Yet often, they know but just don’t care. So the task of serious journalism isn’t just to lay out truths. It is to make vital truths compelling to a big audience.
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It is perhaps when our lives are at their most problematic that we are likely to be most receptive to beautiful things.
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