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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: 54
Born: 1969
Born: December 20
Journalist
Philosopher
Publisher
Writer
City of Zurich
Alain De Botton
Worry
Opted
Call
Calming
Part
Largest
Defend
Sadness
Anxiety
Determined
Personality
More quotes by Alain de Botton
It is by finding out what something is not that one comes closest to understanding what it is.
Alain de Botton
One of our major flaws, and causes of unhappiness, is that we find it hard to take note of appreciate and be grateful for what is always around us. We suffer because we lose sight of the value of what is before us and yearn, often unfairly, for the imagined attraction elsewhere.
Alain de Botton
The pleasure we derive from journeys is perhaps dependent more on the mindset with which we travel than on the destination we travel to.
Alain de Botton
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
Let death find us as we are building up our matchstick protests against its waves.
Alain de Botton
The media insists on taking what someone didn't mean to say as being far closer to the truth than what they did.
Alain de Botton
We should read other people's books in order to learn what we feel it is our own thoughts we should be developing, even if it is another writer's thought that help us to do so.
Alain de Botton
There are selections so acute that they come to define a place, with the result that we can no longer travel through that landscape without being reminded of what a great artist noticed there.
Alain de Botton
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.
Alain de Botton
You have to be quite heavily invested in someone to do them the honour of telling them you're annoyed with them.
Alain de Botton
Travel agents would be wiser to ask us what we hope to change about our lives rather than simply where we wish to go.
Alain de Botton
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.
Alain de Botton
Though debts are condemned in the financial world, the world of friendship and love may perversely depend on well-managed debts.
Alain de Botton
What is a snob? A snob is anybody who takes a small part of you and uses that to come to a complete vision of who you are. That is snobbery.
Alain de Botton
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
What we seek, at the deepest level, is inwardly to resemble, rather than physically to possess, the objects and places that touch us through their beauty.
Alain de Botton
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
It is no coincidence that the Western attraction to sublime landscapes developed at precisely the moment when traditional beliefs in God began to wane.
Alain de Botton
The more familiar two people become, the more the language they speak together departs from that of the ordinary, dictionary-defined discourse. Familiarity creates a new language, an in-house language of intimacy that carries reference to the story the two lovers are weaving together and that cannot be readily understood by others.
Alain de Botton
So many complaints boil down to the belly ache of the fragile, mortal, ignored ego in a vast and indifferent universe.
Alain de Botton
