Quote

It is in books, poems, paintings which often give us the confidence to take seriously feelings in ourselves that we might otherwise never have thought to acknowledge.

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
Might
Otherwise
Book
Confidence
Take
Painting
Giving
Books
Never
Often
Paintings
Feelings
Poems
Thought
Acknowledge
Give
Seriously

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Writing a book has about it some of the anxiety of telling a joke and having to wait several years to know whether or not it was funny.
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The difference between hope and despair is a different way of telling stories from the same facts.
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There is always the option of being emotionally lazy, that is, of quoting.
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The most unbearable thing about many successful people is not - as we flatteringly think - how lazy they are, but how hard they work.
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Philosophy had supplied Socrates with convictions in which he had been able to have rational, as opposed to hysterical, confidence when faced with disapproval.
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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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The longing for destiny is nowhere stronger than in our romantic life.
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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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Rage 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.
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We should not be frightened by appearances.
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We need a home in the psychological sense as much as we need one in the physical: to compensate for a vulnerability. We need a refuge to shore up our states of mind, because so much of the world is opposed to our allegiances. We need our rooms to align us to desirable versions of ourselves and to keep alive the important, evanescent sides of us.
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There may be significant things to learn about people by looking at what annoys them most.
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At the heart of every frustration lies a basic structure: the collision of a wish with an unyielding reality.
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The Arab-Israeli conflict is also in many ways a conflict about status: it's a war between two peoples who feel deeply humiliated by the other, who want the other to respect them. Battles over status can be even more intractable than those over land or water or oil.
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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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Literature deeply stands opposed to the dominant value system-the one that rewards money and power. Writers are on the other side-they make us sympathetic to ideas and feelings that are of deep importance but can’t afford airtime in a commercialized, status-consciou s, and cynical world.
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Wealth is not an absolute. It is relative to desire. Every time we yearn for something we cannot afford, we grow poorer, whatever our resources. And every time we feel satisfied with what we have, we can be counted as rich, however little we may actually possess.
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One's doing well if age improves even slightly one's capacity to hold on to that vital truism: This too shall pass.
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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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Intuition is unconscious accumulated experience informing judgement in real time.
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