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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.
Alain de Botton
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Alain de Botton
Age: 55
Born: 1969
Born: December 20
Journalist
Philosopher
Publisher
Writer
City of Zurich
Alain De Botton
Personality
Worry
Opted
Call
Calming
Part
Largest
Defend
Sadness
Anxiety
Determined
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as the determinants of high status keep shifting, so, too, naturally, will the triggers of status anxiety be altered.
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A lump rises in our throat at the sight of beauty from an implicit knowledge that the happiness it hints at is the exception.
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I feel that the great challenge of our time is the communication of ideas.
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Reputation matters so much only because people so seldom think for themselves.
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We are sad at home and blame the weather and the ugliness of the buildings, but on the tropical island we learn that the state of the skies and the appearance of our dwellings can never on their own underwrite our joy nor condemn us to misery.
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Those who divorce aren't necessarily the most unhappy, just those neatly able to believe their misery is caused by one other person.
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My writing always came out of a very personal place, out of an attempt to stay sane.
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Good books put a finger on emotions that are deeply our own - but that we could never have described on our own.
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We should not be frightened by appearances.
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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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Anxiety is the handmaiden of contemporary ambition.
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People who readily accept the need for a gym will resist that their personalities might need some work too.
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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.
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Only as we mature does affection begin to depend on achievement.
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After 40 (old age for most of man's history), one should strive to be more or less packed and ready to go were the end call to come.
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Taking architecture seriously therefore makes some singular and strenuous demands upon us...It means conceding that we are inconveniently vulnerable to the colour of our wallpaper and that our sense of purpose may be derailed by an unfortunate bedspread
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You have to be quite heavily invested in someone to do them the honour of telling them you're annoyed with them.
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It is perhaps when our lives are at their most problematic that we are likely to be most receptive to beautiful things.
Alain de Botton
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.
Alain de Botton
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
