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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
Tiny
Turn
Turns
Bigs
Obligations
Fear
Disappointing
Others
Kills
Thing
Thousands
Obligation
More quotes by Alain de Botton
I was uncomfortable writing fiction. My love was the personal essay rather than the novel.
Alain de Botton
Artistic accounts involve severe abbreviations of what reality will force upon us.
Alain de Botton
It is perhaps sad books that best console us when we are sad.
Alain de Botton
Dreams reveal we never quite get 'over' anything: it's all still in there somewhere.
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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
The challenge for a human now is to be more interesting to another than his or her smartphone.
Alain de Botton
Not being understood may be taken as a sign that there is much in one to understand.
Alain de Botton
Intuition is unconscious accumulated experience informing judgement in real time.
Alain de Botton
In Britain, because I live here, I can also run into problems of envy and competition. But all this is just in a day's work for a writer. You can't put stuff out there without someone calling you a complete fool. Oh, well.
Alain de Botton
As adults, we try to develop the character traits that would have rescued our parents.
Alain de Botton
For all his understanding of worldly concerns, when it came to fathoming the deeper meaning of his own furious activity, Sir Bob displayed the sort of laziness for which he himself had no patience in others. He appeared to have only a passing interest in the overall purpose of his financial accumulation.
Alain de Botton
Most anger stems from feelings of weakness, sadness and fear: hard to remember when one is at the receiving end of its defiant roar.
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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
Paying tax should be framed as a glorious civic duty worthy of gratitude - not a punishment for making money.
Alain de Botton
I assemble my ideas in pieces on a computer file, then gradually find a place for them on a piece of scaffolding I erect.
Alain de Botton
It was no longer her absence that wounded me, but my growing indifference to it. Forgetting, however calming, was also a reminder of infidelity to what I had at one time held so dear.
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
These inventors were elevating the formulation of entrepreneurial ideas to the status of a visionary activity. Though forced to justify their efforts in the pragmatic language of venture capital, they were at heart utopian thinkers intent on transforming the world.
Alain de Botton
Insomnia is a glamorous term for thoughts you forgot to have in the day.
Alain de Botton
It is striking how much more seriously we are likely to be taken after we have been dead a few centuries.
Alain de Botton
