Though it may feel otherwise, enjoying life is no more dangerous than apprehending it with continuous anxiety and gloom.
ALAIN DE BOTTONWe don’t really learn anything properly until there is a problem, until we are in pain, until something fails to go as we had hoped … We suffer, therefore we think.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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If one felt successful, there’d be so little incentive to be successful.
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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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Most of what makes a book ‘good’ is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.
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How do the stems connect to the roots?’ ‘Where is the mist coming from?’ ‘Why does one tree seem darker than another?’ These questions are implicitly asked and answered in the process of sketching.
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Being content is perhaps no less easy than playing the violin well: and requires no less practice.
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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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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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Arguments are like eels: however logical, they may slip from the minds weak grasp unless fixed there by imagery and style.
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The fear of saying something stupid (which stupid people never have) has censored far more good ideas than bad ones.
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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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Don’t despair: despair suggests you are in total control and know what is coming. You don’t – surrender to events with hope.
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The company of certain people may excite our generosity and sensitivity, while that of others awakens our competitiveness and envy.
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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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One kind of good book should leave you asking: how did the author know that about me?
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We often lose our tempers not with those who are actually to blame; just with those who love us enough to forgive us our foul moods.
ALAIN DE BOTTON