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Don't despair: despair suggests you are in total control and know what is coming. You don't - surrender to events with hope.

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
Surrender
Total
Despair
Events
Coming
Control
Hope
Suggests

More quotes by Alain de Botton

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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.
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The more dignity is widely and freely available in a society, the less people want to be famous.
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Not being understood may be taken as a sign that there is much in one to understand.
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One of the best protections against disappointment is to have a lot going on.
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Rather than getting more spoilt with age, as difficulties pile up, epiphanies of gratitude abound.
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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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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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It is perhaps sad books that best console us when we are sad, and to lonely service stations that we should drive when there is no one for us to hold or love.
Alain de Botton
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Work finally begins when the fear of doing nothing exceeds the fear of doing it badly.
Alain de Botton
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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.
Alain de Botton
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Not everyone is worth listening to.
Alain de Botton
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It should not be Illiers-Combray that we visit: a genuine homage to Proust would be to look at our world through his eyes, not look at his world through our eyes.
Alain de Botton
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Only by declaring a book completely finished can one start to see how much remains to be done on it.
Alain de Botton
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We are sensitized by the books we read. And the more books we read, and the deeper their lessons sink into us, the more pairs of glasses we have. And those glasses enable us to see things we would have otherwise missed.
Alain de Botton
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What should worry us is not the number of people that oppose us, but how good their reasons are for doing so.
Alain de Botton
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As we write, so we build: to keep a record of what matters to us.
Alain de Botton
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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.
Alain de Botton
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I feel that the great challenge of our time is the communication of ideas.
Alain de Botton
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We often lose our tempers not with those who are actually to blame just with those who love us enough to forgive us our foul moods.
Alain de Botton
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A notorious inability to express emotions makes human beings the only animals capable of suicide.
Alain de Botton