Quote

The largest part of what we call 'personality' is determined by how we've opted to defend ourselves against anxiety and sadness.

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
Call
Calming
Part
Largest
Defend
Sadness
Anxiety
Determined
Personality
Worry
Opted

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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.
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A world where a majority had imbibed the lessons implicit within tragic art would be one in which the consequences of our failures would necessarily cease to weigh upon us so heavily.
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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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I assemble my ideas in pieces on a computer file, then gradually find a place for them on a piece of scaffolding I erect.
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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.
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We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them.
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I think people want to get married to end their emotional uncertainty. In a way, they want to end powerful feelings, or certainly the negative ones.
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Travel agents would be wiser to ask us what we hope to change about our lives rather than simply where we wish to go.
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Instead of bringing back 1600 plants, we might return from our journeys with a collection of small unfêted but life-enhancing thoughts.
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It wasn't only fanatics and drunkards who began conversations with strangers in public.
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The media insists on taking what someone didn't mean to say as being far closer to the truth than what they did.
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We will cease to be angry once we cease to be so hopeful.
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We should not be frightened by appearances.
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The good parent: someone who doesn't mind, for a time, being hated by their children.
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Architects themselves tend to shy away from the word, preferring instead to talk about the manipulation of space.
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We accept the need to train extensively to fly a plane but think instinct should be enough for marrying and raising kids.
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I know a lot about writing, but I don't know much about how other industries work. I've tried to use my naivety to my advantage.
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As adults, we try to develop the character traits that would have rescued our parents.
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I am conscious of trying to stretch the boundaries of non-fiction writing. It's always surprised me how little attention many non-fiction writers pay to the formal aspects of their work.
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Our sense of what is valuable will hence be radically distorted if we must perpetually condemn as tedious everything we lack, simply because we lack it.
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