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I was uncomfortable writing fiction. My love was the personal essay rather than the novel.

Alain de Botton

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Alain de Botton
Age: 54
Born: 1969
Born: December 20
Journalist
Philosopher
Publisher
Writer
City of Zurich
Alain De Botton
Uncomfortable
Novel
Fiction
Personal
Rather
Writing
Love
Essay
Essays

More quotes by Alain de Botton

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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
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Not being understood may be taken as a sign that there is much in one to understand.
Alain de Botton
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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
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The finest proof of our loyalty toward one another was our monstrous disloyalties towards everyone else.
Alain de Botton
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We should not be frightened by appearances.
Alain de Botton
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The good parent: someone who doesn't mind, for a time, being hated by their children.
Alain de Botton
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We are presented with an unpleasant choice between either committing to peculiar concepts about immaterial deities or letting go entirely of a host of consoling, subtle or just charming rituals for which we struggle to find equivalents in secular society.
Alain de Botton
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We each appear to hold within ourselves a range of divergent views as to our native qualities.. And amid such uncertainty, we typically turn to the wider world to settle the question of our significance.. we seem beholden to affections of others to endure ourselves.
Alain de Botton
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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
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Status anxiety definitely exists at a political level. Many Iraqis were annoyed with the US essentially for reasons of status: for not showing them respect, for humiliating them.
Alain de Botton
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Insomnia is a glamorous term for thoughts you forgot to have in the day.
Alain de Botton
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In the gap between who we wish one day to be and who we are at present, must come pain, anxiety, envy and humiliation.
Alain de Botton
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To look at the paper is to raise a seashell to one's ear and to be overwhelmed by the roar of humanity.
Alain de Botton
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Though debts are condemned in the financial world, the world of friendship and love may perversely depend on well-managed debts.
Alain de Botton
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We may not agree with what religions are trying to teach us, but we can admire the institutional way in which they're doing it.
Alain de Botton
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We keep a special place in our hearts for people who refuse to be impressed by us.
Alain de Botton
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What kills us isn't one big thing, but thousands of tiny obligations we can't turn down for fear of disappointing others.
Alain de Botton
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To cut out every negative root would simultaneously mean choking off positive elements that might arise from it further up the stem of the plant. We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them.
Alain de Botton
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The challenge of modern relationships: how to prove more interesting than the other's smartphone.
Alain de Botton
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Bad architecture is in the end as much a failure of psychology as of design. It is an example expressed through materials of the same tendencies which in other domains will lead us to marry the wrong people, choose inappropriate jobs and book unsuccessful holidays: the tendency not to understand who we are and what will satisfy us.
Alain de Botton