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Anyone who isn't embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn't learning enough.
Alain de Botton
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Alain de Botton
Age: 54
Born: 1969
Born: December 20
Journalist
Philosopher
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Writer
City of Zurich
Alain De Botton
Probably
Year
Anyone
Lasts
Last
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Years
Embarrassed
Learning
More quotes by Alain de Botton
I was foreign and Jewish, with a funny name, and was very small and hated sport, a real problem at an English prep school. So the way to get round it was to become the school joker, which I did quite effectively - I was always fooling around to make the people who would otherwise dump me in the loo laugh.
Alain de Botton
Writing isn’t a career choice. It’s self-medication that over time precipitates the madness it was meant to ward off.
Alain de Botton
The secular world is full of holes. We have secularized badly.
Alain de Botton
what we call a home is merely any place that succeeds in making more consistenly available to us the important truths which the wider world ignores, or which our distracted and irresolute selves have trouble holding onto. (p123) Architecture of Happiness
Alain de Botton
What we find exotic abroad may be what we hunger for in vain at home.
Alain de Botton
There are people who say, 'Oh this guy is quite thick.' I think the reason is that, increasingly, I don't mind being simple in terms of literary expression. Others say, 'No, no, no. He went to Cambridge. He got a good degree. He must be Einstein.'
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
Most of what makes a book 'good' is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.
Alain de Botton
Although I don't believe in God, Bach's music shows me what a love of God must feel like.
Alain de Botton
The largest part of what we call 'personality' is determined by how we've opted to defend ourselves against anxiety and sadness.
Alain de Botton
Never too late to learn some embarrassingly basic, stupidly obvious things about oneself.
Alain de Botton
As victims of hurt, we frequently don't bring up what ails us, because so many wounds look absurd in the light of day.
Alain de Botton
The fear of saying something stupid (which stupid people never have) has censored far more good ideas than bad ones.
Alain de Botton
There is always the option of being emotionally lazy, that is, of quoting.
Alain de Botton
People who go on to be writers are those who can forgive themselves the horror of the first draft.
Alain de Botton
Status anxiety definitely exists at a political level. Many Iraqis were annoyed with the US essentially for reasons of status: for not showing them respect, for humiliating them.
Alain de Botton
The most attractive are not those who allow us to kiss them at once [we soon feel ungrateful] or those who never allow us to kiss them [we soon forget them], but those who coyly lead us between the two extremes.
Alain de Botton
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
Not being understood may be taken as a sign that there is much in one to understand.
Alain de Botton
Rather than saying 'I hate mess', it might draw more compassion to say, 'mess terrifies me as a harbinger of catastrophe'.
Alain de Botton
