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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: 54
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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The challenge for a human now is to be more interesting to another than his or her smartphone.
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Bitterness: anger that forgot where it came from.
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In their different ways, art and philosophy help us, in Schopenhauer's words, to turn pain into knowledge.
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The moment we cry in a film is not when things are sad but when they turn out to be more beautiful than we expected them to be.
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We are presented with an unpleasant choice between either committing to peculiar concepts about immaterial deities or letting go entirely of a host of consoling, subtle or just charming rituals for which we struggle to find equivalents in secular society.
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Everyone returns us to a different sense of ourselves, for we become a little of who they think we are.
Alain de Botton
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It is perhaps sad books that best console us when we are sad.
Alain de Botton
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Let death find us as we are building up our matchstick protests against its waves.
Alain de Botton
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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
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Good sex isn't just fun, it keeps us sane and happy. Having sex with someone makes us feel wanted, alive and potent.
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According to Montaigne, it was the oppressive notion that we had complete mental control over our bodies, and the horror of departing from this portrait of normality, that had left the man unable to perform sexually.
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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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Pick up any newspaper or magazine, open the TV, and you'll be bombarded with suggestions of how to have a successful life. Some of these suggestions are deeply unhelpful to our own projects and priorities - and we should take care.
Alain de Botton
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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.
Alain de Botton
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You need a long hard day's work to reveal the logic of the craving for very bad tv and alcohol.
Alain de Botton
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The real issue is not whether baking biscuits is meaningful, but the extent to which the activity can seem to be so after it has been continuously stretched and subdivided across five thousand lives.
Alain de Botton
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The problem isn't so much finding good ideas (there is no shortage) as embedding the ones we have into everyday practice.
Alain de Botton
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The price we have paid for expecting to be so much more than our ancestors is a perpetual anxiety that we are far from being all we might be.
Alain de Botton
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Though debts are condemned in the financial world, the world of friendship and love may perversely depend on well-managed debts.
Alain de Botton
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Envy: a confused, tangled guide to one's own ambitions.
Alain de Botton