How generous was it to offer gifts to people one knew would never accept them?
ALAIN DE BOTTONThe fear of saying something stupid (which stupid people never have) has censored far more good ideas than bad ones.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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Maturity: the confidence to have no opinions on many things.
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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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True respectability stems not from the will of the majority but from proper reasoning.
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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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One of the best protections against disappointment is to have a lot going on.
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As we write, so we build: to keep a record of what matters to us.
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The very act of drawing an object, however badly, swiftly takes the drawer from a woolly sense of what the object looks like to a precise awareness of its component parts and particularities.
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The best cure for one’s bad tendencies is to see them in action in another person.
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My writing always came out of a very personal place, out of an attempt to stay sane.
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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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What should worry us is not the number of people that oppose us, but how good their reasons are for doing so.
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Bad art might be defined as a series of bad choices about what to show and what to leave out.
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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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Our minds are susceptible to the influence of external voices telling us what we require to be satisfied, voices that may drown out the faint sounds emitted by our souls and distract us from the careful, arduous task of accurately naming our priorities.
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It’s hard loving those who don’t much like themselves: “If you’re so great, why would you think I’m so great.
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