You have to be quite heavily invested in someone to do them the honour of telling them you’re annoyed with them.
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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We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them.
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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 finest proof of our loyalty toward one another was our monstrous disloyalties towards everyone else.
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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.
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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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Everyone returns us to a different sense of ourselves, for we become a little of who they think we are.
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We may seek a fortune for no greater reason than to secure the respect and attention of people who would otherwise look straight through us.
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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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Anyone who isn’t embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn’t learning enough.
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Literature is the greatest reality simulator – a machine that puts you through infinitely more situations than you can ever directly witness.
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It’s as though either you accept [religious] doctrine and then you can have all the nice stuff, or you reject the doctrine and you’re living in some kind of spiritual wasteland under the guidance of CNN and Walmart.
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The moment we cry in a film is not when things are sad but when they turn out to be more beautiful than we expected them to be.
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The greatest difficulty of Travel is that one is forced to take oneself along.
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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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The media insists on taking what someone didn’t mean to say as being far closer to the truth than what they did.
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