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Being content is perhaps no less easy than playing the violin well: and requires no less practice.

Alain de Botton

Insomnia is a glamorous term for thoughts you forgot to have in the day.
ALAIN DE BOTTON

Dance Forgot Glamorous Insomnia Term Thought
Our jobs make relentless calls on a narrow band of our faculties, reducing our chances of achieving rounded personalities and leaving us to suspect (often in the gathering darkness of a Sunday evening) that much of who we are, or could be, has gone unexplored.
ALAIN DE BOTTON

Achieve Band Faculty Job Make Narrow Personality Reduce Change Relentless Round
The finest proof of our loyalty toward one another was our monstrous disloyalties towards everyone else.
ALAIN DE BOTTON

Another Disloyalty Everyone Finest Loyalty Monstrous Proof Toward
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

Believe Dangerous Immediate Invulnerable Reject Ridiculous Sex
In their different ways, art and philosophy help us, in Schopenhauer’s words, to turn pain into knowledge.
ALAIN DE BOTTON

Art Different Help Knowledge Pain People Philosophy Way Word
Our responses to the world are crucially moulded by the company we keep, for we temper our curiosity to fit in with the expectations of others.
ALAIN DE BOTTON

Compare Crucial Expectation Keep Mould Other Response Temper World
One of the unexpectedly important things that art can do for us is to teach us how to suffer more successfully.
ALAIN DE BOTTON

Important One Successful Suffer Teach Thing Unexpectedly
The fear of saying something stupid (which stupid people never have) has censored far more good ideas than bad ones.
ALAIN DE BOTTON

Censor Fear Idea People Say Something Stupid
William James once made an acute point about the relationship between happiness and expectation. He argued that satisfaction with ourselves does not require us to succeed in every endeavour.
ALAIN DE BOTTON

Acute Between Endeavour Expectation Happiness Made Point Relationship
A virtuous, ordinary life, striving for wisdom but never far from folly, is achievement enough.
ALAIN DE BOTTON

Archive Enough Ordinary Strive Virtuous Wisdom
Our minds are susceptible to the influence of external voices telling us what we require to be satisfied, voices that may drown out the faint sounds emitted by our souls and distract us from the careful, arduous task of accurately naming our priorities.
ALAIN DE BOTTON

Drown External Influence Mind Require Satisfy Susceptible Tell Voice
You have to be quite heavily invested in someone to do them the honour of telling them you’re annoyed with them.
ALAIN DE BOTTON

Annoy Heavily Honor Invest Quite Someone Tell
There are selections so acute that they come to define a place, with the result that we can no longer travel through that landscape without being reminded of what a great artist noticed there.
ALAIN DE BOTTON

Acute Come Define Landscape Longer Place Result Selection Travel
We 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.
ALAIN DE BOTTON

Anything Hope Learn Pain Properly Something Suffer
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.
ALAIN DE BOTTON

Access Emotion Like Literature Look Range Saver Time Ultimate Waste
It is perhaps sad books that best console us when we are sad.
ALAIN DE BOTTON

Book Console Perhaps Sad

Being content is perhaps no less easy than playing the violin well: and requires no less practice.

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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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Popular Authors

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