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

Alain de Botton

Maturity: knowing where you’re crazy, trying to warn others of the fact and striving to keep yourself under control.
ALAIN DE BOTTON

Control Crazy Know Maturity Try Under
One rarely falls in love without being as much attracted to what is interestingly wrong with someone as what is objectively healthy.
ALAIN DE BOTTON

Attract Fall Healthy Interest Object Rare Someone
Arguments are like eels: however logical, they may slip from the minds weak grasp unless fixed there by imagery and style.
ALAIN DE BOTTON

Argument Eel Fixed Grasp Imagery Like Logical Mind Slip Style Unless Weak
Which seems no less relevant in the secular realm than in the religious one-that we have within us a precious, childlike, vulnerable core which we should nourish and nurture on its turbulent journey through life.
ALAIN DE BOTTON

Childlike Journey Life Nourish Precious Relevant Secular Seem Vulnerable
The media insists on taking what someone didn’t mean to say as being far closer to the truth than what they did.
ALAIN DE BOTTON

Closer Insist Media On Being Say Truth
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
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

Actual Blame Enough Foul Lose Often Temper Those
The greatest difficulty of Travel is that one is forced to take oneself along.
ALAIN DE BOTTON

Along Difficult Force Greatest Oneself Travel
Memory is… similar to anticipation: an instrument of simplification and selection.
ALAIN DE BOTTON

Anticipation Instrument Memory Selection Similar Simplification
So many complaints boil down to the belly ache of the fragile, mortal, ignored ego in a vast and indifferent universe.
ALAIN DE BOTTON

Ache Belly Complaint Down Ego Fragile Ignore Universe
Literature deserves its prestige for one reason above all others – because it’s a tool to help us live and die with a little bit more wisdom, goodness, and sanity.
ALAIN DE BOTTON

Above Bit Deserve Help Literature Little Other Prestige Reason Tool
Writing isn’t a career choice. It’s self-medication that over time precipitates the madness it was meant to ward off.
ALAIN DE BOTTON

Career Choice Education Mad Precipitate Ward Write
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
The attentions of others matter to us because we are afflicted by a congenital uncertainty as to our own value, as a result of which affliction we tend to allow others’ appraisals to play a determining role in how we see ourselves. Our sense of identity is held captive by the judgements of those we live among.
ALAIN DE BOTTON

Affiche Appraisal Attention Congenital Determine Matter People Uncertainty
Work is most fulfilling when you’re at the comfortable, exciting edge of not quite knowing what you are doing.
ALAIN DE BOTTON

Comfortable Do Edge Excite Fulfill Quite Work
Travel agents would be wiser to ask us what we hope to change about our lives rather than simply where we wish to go.
ALAIN DE BOTTON

Agent Ask Change Hope Simply Travel Wiser Wish

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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