Quote

What kills us isn't one big thing, but thousands of tiny obligations we can't turn down for fear of disappointing others.

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
Fear
Disappointing
Others
Kills
Thing
Thousands
Obligation
Tiny
Turn
Turns
Bigs
Obligations

More quotes by Alain de Botton

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Pegging your contentment to the overall state of the world rather than of your own life: the basis of morality, or a sort of madness?
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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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Dreams reveal we never quite get 'over' anything: it's all still in there somewhere.
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I feel that the great challenge of our time is the communication of ideas.
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The longing for destiny is nowhere stronger than in our romantic life.
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Our disrespect for thinking: someone sitting in a chair, gazing out of a window blankly, always described as 'doing nothing'.
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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.
Alain de Botton
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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
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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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Intuition is unconscious accumulated experience informing judgement in real time.
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The problem is if you really believe in a society where those who merit to get to the top, get to the top, you’ll also, by implication … believe in a society where those who deserve to get to the bottom also get to the bottom and stay there.
Alain de Botton
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Rather than getting more spoilt with age, as difficulties pile up, epiphanies of gratitude abound.
Alain de Botton
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One of the unexpectedly important things that art can do for us is to teach us how to suffer more successfully.
Alain de Botton
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We are all more intelligent than we are capable, and awareness of the insanity of love has never saved anyone from the disease.
Alain de Botton
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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.
Alain de Botton
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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
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Our capacity to draw happiness from aesthetic objects or material goods in fact seems critically dependent on our first satisfying a more important range of emotional or psychological needs, among them the need for understanding, for love, expression and respect.
Alain de Botton
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We feel something, and reach out for the nearest phrase or hum with which to communicate, but which fails to do justice to what has induced us to do so....We stay on the outside of our impressions, as if staring at them through a frosted window, superficially related to them, yet estranged from whatever has eluded casual definition.
Alain de Botton
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The true nature of bureaucracy may be nowhere more obvious to the observer than in a developing country, for only there will it still be made manifest by the full complement of documents, files, veneered desks and cabinets - which convey the strict and inverse relationship between productivity and paperwork.
Alain de Botton
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The desire for high status is never stronger than in situations where ordinary life fails to answer a median need for dignity and comfort.
Alain de Botton