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 BOTTONRage is caused by a conviction, almost comic in its optimistic origins (however tragic in its effects), that a given frustration has not been written into the contract of life.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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Work is most fulfilling when you’re at the comfortable, exciting edge of not quite knowing what you are doing.
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If we are inclined to forget how much there is in the world besides that which we anticipate, then works of art are perhaps a little to blame, for in them we find at work the same process of simplification or selection as in the imagination.
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Most victories are, in the best way, acts of revenge.
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To be shown love is to feel ourselves the object of concern: our presence is noted, our name is registered, our views are listened to, our failings are treated with indulgence and our needs are ministered to. And under such care, we flourish.
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Dreams reveal we never quite get ‘over’ anything: it’s all still in there somewhere.
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Unhappiness can stem from having only one perspective to play with.
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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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The largest part of what we call ‘personality’ is determined by how we’ve opted to defend ourselves against anxiety and sadness”.
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Getting to the top has an unfortunate tendency to persuade people that the system is OK after all.
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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.
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A virtuous, ordinary life, striving for wisdom but never far from folly, is achievement enough.
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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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Work finally begins when the fear of doing nothing exceeds the fear of doing it badly.
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It’s hard loving those who don’t much like themselves: “If you’re so great, why would you think I’m so great.
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It is by finding out what something is not that one comes closest to understanding what it is.
ALAIN DE BOTTON