Not being understood may be taken as a sign that there is much in one to understand.
ALAIN DE BOTTONMost good thinking has its origin in fear.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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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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One of the best protections against disappointment is to have a lot going on.
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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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You normally have to be bashed about a bit by life to see the point of daffodils, sunsets and uneventful nice days.
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I learnt to stop fantasising about the perfect job or the perfect relationship because that can actually be an excuse for not living.
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We study biology, physics, movements of glaciers… Where are the classes on envy, feeling wronged, despair, bitterness.
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Differ though we might with Christianity’s view of what precisely our souls need, it is hard to discredit the provocative underlying thesis.
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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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Never too late to learn some embarrassingly basic, stupidly obvious things about oneself.
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When I see someone like Richard Dawkins, I see my father. I grew up with that. I’m basically the child of Richard Dawkins.
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One rarely falls in love without being as much attracted to what is interestingly wrong with someone as what is objectively healthy.
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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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We read the weird tales in newspapers to crowd out the even weirder stuff inside us.
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Sweetness is the opposite of machismo, which is everywhere-and I really don’t get on with machismo. I’m interested in sensitivity, and weakness, and fear, and anxiety, because I think that, at the end of the day, behind our masks, that’s what we are.
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Without sex, we would be dangerously invulnerable. We might believe we were not ridiculous. We wouldn’t know rejection and humiliation so intimately.
ALAIN DE BOTTON