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Though it may feel otherwise, enjoying life is no more dangerous than apprehending it with continuous anxiety and gloom.

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
Life
Otherwise
Dangerous
Worry
Apprehending
Though
Gloom
Enjoy
Continuous
May
Enjoying
Feel
Enjoyment
Feels
Anxiety

More quotes by Alain de Botton

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Because the rhythm of conversation makes no allowance for dead periods, because the presence of others calls for continuous responses, we are left to regret the inanity of what we say, and the missed opportunity of what we do not.
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The study of maps and the perusal of travel books aroused in me a secret fascination that was at times almost irresistible.
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A great writer picks up on those things that matter. It’s almost like their radar is attuned to the most significant moments.
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What am I supposed to do here? What am I supposed to think?
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Anxiety is the handmaiden of contemporary ambition.
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Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone - and finding that that's ok with them.
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Much of the really serious trouble in the world gets going with a sense of humiliation.
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Rather than employing it as a supplement to active, conscious seeing, they used the medium as a substitute, paying less attention to the world than they had done previously, taking it on faith that photography automatically assured them possession of it.
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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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A danger of travel is that we see things at the wrong time, before we have had a chance to build up the necessary receptivity and when new information is therefore as useless and fugitive as necklace beads without a connecting chain.
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Let's say you went to Harvard or Oxford or Cambridge, and you said, 'I've come here because I'm in search of morality, guidance and consolation I want to know how to live,' - they would show you the way to the insane asylum.
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Distress at losing an object can be as much a frustration at the intellectual mystery of the disappearance as about the loss itself.
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There may be significant things to learn about people by looking at what annoys them most.
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The telephone becomes an instrument of torture in the demonic hands of a beloved who doesn't call.
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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.
Alain de Botton
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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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The degree of sympathy we feel regarding another's fiasco is directly proportional to how easy or difficult it is for us to imagine ourselves, under like circumstances, making a similar mistake.
Alain de Botton
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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
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Bad art might be defined as a series of bad choices about what to show and what to leave out.
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The arrogance that says analysing the relationship between reasons and causes is more important than writing a philosophy of shyness or sadness or friendship drives me nuts. I can't accept that.
Alain de Botton