It is perhaps sad books that best console us when we are sad.
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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Our disrespect for thinking: someone sitting in a chair, gazing out of a window blankly, always described as ‘doing nothing’.
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We keep a special place in our hearts for people who refuse to be impressed by us.
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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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Unnatural to expect that learning to be happy should be any easier than, say, learning to play the violin or require any less practice.
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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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Getting to the top has an unfortunate tendency to persuade people that the system is OK after all.
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Rage is caused by a conviction, almost comic in its optimistic origins (however tragic in its effects), that a given frustration has not been written into the contract of life.
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It looks like it’s wasting time, but literature is actually the ultimate time-saver – because it gives us access to a range of emotions and events that it would take you years, decades, millennia to try to experience directly.
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The only people we can think of as normal are those we don’t yet know very well.
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A danger of travel is that we see things at the wrong time, before we have had a chance to build up the necessary receptivity and when new information is therefore as useless and fugitive as necklace beads without a connecting chain.
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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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What am I supposed to do here? What am I supposed to think?
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Envy: a confused, tangled guide to one’s own ambitions.
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The problem isn’t so much finding good ideas (there is no shortage) as embedding the ones we have into everyday practice.
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Don’t despair: despair suggests you are in total control and know what is coming. You don’t – surrender to events with hope.
ALAIN DE BOTTON