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There’s a whole category of people who miss out by not allowing themselves to be weird enough.

Alain de Botton

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

Come Control Despair Hope Suggest Surrender Total
Most anger stems from feelings of weakness, sadness and fear: hard to remember when one is at the receiving end of its defiant roar.
ALAIN DE BOTTON

Anger End Fear Feel Most Receive Remember Weakness
The blunt large questions become connected to smaller, apparently esoteric ones.
ALAIN DE BOTTON

Apparently Blunt Connect Esoteric Larger One Question Smaller
The greatest works of art speak to us without knowing us.
ALAIN DE BOTTON

Greatest Speak Without Know Work
It was no longer her absence that wounded me, but my growing indifference to it. Forgetting, however calming, was also a reminder of infidelity to what I had at one time held so dear.
ALAIN DE BOTTON

Absence Calm Forget Grow Identify Indifference Longer Reminder Time Wounded
We need a refuge to shore up our states of mind, because so much of the world is opposed to our allegiances. We need our rooms to align us to desirable versions of ourselves and to keep alive the important, evanescent sides of us.
ALAIN DE BOTTON

Allegiance Desirable Important Mind Need Oppose Shore Site State Version World
…if the beginnings of love and amorous politics are equally rosy, then the ends may be equally bloody.
ALAIN DE BOTTON

Amorous Beginning Bloody End Equally Love Politics
Our homes do not have to offer us permanent occupancy or store our clothes to merit the name. To speak of home in relation to a building is simply to recognise its harmony with our own prized internal song. Home can be an airport or a library, a garden or a motorway diner.
ALAIN DE BOTTON

Home Merit Name Occupancy Permanent Speak
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.
ALAIN DE BOTTON

Build Chain Change Connect Danger Information Necessary Receptivity See Thing Travel
Out of the millions of people we live among, most of whom we habitually ignore and are ignored by in turn, there are always a few that hold hostage our capacity for happiness, whom we could recognize by their smell alone and whom we would rather die than be without.
ALAIN DE BOTTON

Always Among Habitat Ignore Million People Turn
One kind of good book should leave you asking: how did the author know that about me?
ALAIN DE BOTTON

Ask Author Book Kind Know Leave One
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.
ALAIN DE BOTTON

Anyone Bookseller Destination Most Number Talk Valuable
Those who divorce aren’t necessarily the most unhappy, just those neatly able to believe their misery is caused by one other person.
ALAIN DE BOTTON

Belive Cause Divorce Most Neat Necessary Other Unhappy
A virtuous, ordinary life, striving for wisdom but never far from folly, is achievement enough.
ALAIN DE BOTTON

Archive Enough Ordinary Strive Virtuous Wisdom
Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone – and finding that that’s ok with them.
ALAIN DE BOTTON

Capacity Find Intimacy Rather Someone
Must being in love always mean being in pain?
ALAIN DE BOTTON

Always Being Love Must Pain

There’s a whole category of people who miss out by not allowing themselves to be weird enough.

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There’s a whole category of people who miss out by not allowing themselves to be weird enough.

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