When work is not going well, it’s useful to remember that our identities stretch beyond what is on the business card, that we were people long before we became workers – and will continue to be human once we have put our tools down forever.
ALAIN DE BOTTONThere is a devilishly direct relationship between the significance of an idea and how nervous we become at the prospect of having to think about it.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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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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Writing isn’t a career choice. It’s self-medication that over time precipitates the madness it was meant to ward off.
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The inability to live in the present lies in the fear of leaving the sheltered position of anticipation or memory, and so of admitting that this is the only life that one is ever likely (heavenly intervention aside) to live.
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Curiosity takes ignorance seriously – and is confident enough to admit when it’s in the dark. It is aware of not knowing. And then it sets out to do something about it.
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Work finally begins when the fear of doing nothing exceeds the fear of doing it badly.
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Most anger stems from feelings of weakness, sadness and fear: hard to remember when one is at the receiving end of its defiant roar.
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It is in dialogue with pain that many beautiful things acquire their value. Acquaintance with grief turns out to be one of the more unusual prerequisites of architectural appreciation. We might, quite aside from all other requirements, need to be a little sad before buildings can properly touch us.
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We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them.
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True respectability stems not from the will of the majority but from proper reasoning.
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The greatest works of art speak to us without knowing us.
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Everyone returns us to a different sense of ourselves, for we become a little of who they think we are.
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There is always the option of being emotionally lazy, that is, of quoting.
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We are all more intelligent than we are capable, and awareness of the insanity of love has never saved anyone from the disease.
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…if the beginnings of love and amorous politics are equally rosy, then the ends may be equally bloody.
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We are not always humiliated by failing; we are humiliated only if we first invest our pride and sense of worth in a given achievement and then do not reach it.
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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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If one felt successful, there’d be so little incentive to be successful.
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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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Dreams reveal we never quite get ‘over’ anything: it’s all still in there somewhere.
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Differ though we might with Christianity’s view of what precisely our souls need, it is hard to discredit the provocative underlying thesis.
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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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In the oasis complex, the thirsty man images he sees water, palm trees, and shade not because he has evidence for the belief, but because he has a need for it. Desperate needs bring about a hallucination of their solution: thirst hallucinates water.
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Happiness is impossible for longer than 15 minutes. We are the descendants of creatures who, above all else, worried.
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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.
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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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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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