What I want to argue for is not that we should give up on our ideas of success, but that we should make sure that they are our own. We should focus in on our ideas and make sure that we own them, that we’re truly the authors of our own ambitions.
ALAIN DE BOTTONIt 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.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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I am in general a very pessimistic person with an optimistic, day to day take on things. The bare facts of life are utterly terrifying. And yet, one can laugh. Indeed, one has to laugh precisely because of the darkness: the nervous laughter of the trenches.
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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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The fear of saying something stupid (which stupid people never have) has censored far more good ideas than bad ones.
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Everyone wants a better life: very few of us want to be better people.
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Though it may feel otherwise, enjoying life is no more dangerous than apprehending it with continuous anxiety and gloom.
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We are like an exquisite high-speed aircraft which for lack of a tiny part is left stranded beside the runway, rendered slower than a tractor or bicycle.
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William James once made an acute point about the relationship between happiness and expectation. He argued that satisfaction with ourselves does not require us to succeed in every endeavour.
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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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…if the beginnings of love and amorous politics are equally rosy, then the ends may be equally bloody.
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Not everyone is worth listening to.
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Booksellers are the most valuable destination for the lonely, given the numbers of books that were written because authors couldn’t find anyone to talk to.
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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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Philosophy had supplied Socrates with convictions in which he had been able to have rational, as opposed to hysterical, confidence when faced with disapproval.
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Rather than employing it as a supplement to active, conscious seeing, they used the medium as a substitute, paying less attention to the world than they had done previously, taking it on faith that photography automatically assured them possession of it.
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Our jobs make relentless calls on a narrow band of our faculties, reducing our chances of achieving rounded personalities and leaving us to suspect (often in the gathering darkness of a Sunday evening) that much of who we are, or could be, has gone unexplored.
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