We keep a special place in our hearts for people who refuse to be impressed by us.
ALAIN DE BOTTONWork finally begins when the fear of doing nothing exceeds the fear of doing it badly.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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Art cannot single-handedly create enthusiasm… it merely contributes to enthusiasm and guides us to be more conscious of feelings that we might previously have experienced only tentatively or hurriedly.
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So many complaints boil down to the belly ache of the fragile, mortal, ignored ego in a vast and indifferent universe.
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One of the better guarantors of ending up in a good relationship: an advanced capacity to be alone.
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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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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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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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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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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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I went to church and couldn’t swallow it. The music was nice but I don’t belong there.
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Maturity: the confidence to have no opinions on many things.
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Taking photographs can assuage the itch for possession sparked by the beauty of a place; our anxiety over losing a precious scene can decline with every click of the shutter.
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Every realistic picture represents a choice as to which features of reality should be given prominence; no painting ever captures the whole.
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He did not mean to depress us, rather to free us from expectations which inspire bitterness. It is consoling, when love has let us down, to hear that happiness was never part of the plan.
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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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Insomnia is a glamorous term for thoughts you forgot to have in the day.
ALAIN DE BOTTON