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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

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Alain de Botton
Age: 54
Born: 1969
Born: December 20
Journalist
Philosopher
Publisher
Writer
City of Zurich
Alain De Botton
Also
Competition
Problem
Calling
Live
Fool
Wells
Writer
Without
Problems
Well
Stuff
Britain
Writing
Running
Envy
Work
Someone
Complete

More quotes by Alain de Botton

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Writing isn’t a career choice. It’s self-medication that over time precipitates the madness it was meant to ward off.
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We read the weird tales in newspapers to crowd out the even weirder stuff inside us.
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If it is true that love is the pursuit in another of qualities we lack in ourselves, then in our love of someone from another culture, one ambition may be to weld ourselves more closely to values missing from our own culture.
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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.
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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.
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We should keep a careful diary of our moments of envy: they are our covert guides to what we should try to do next.
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The greatest works of art speak to us without knowing us.
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Our greatest furies spring from events which violate our sense of the ground of our existence.
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In the gap between who we wish one day to be and who we are at present, must come pain, anxiety, envy and humiliation.
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It seems the only way to write a half decent book is to worry oneself sick on an hourly basis that one is producing a complete disaster.
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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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As victims of hurt, we frequently don't bring up what ails us, because so many wounds look absurd in the light of day.
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Wealth is not an absolute. It is relative to desire. Every time we yearn for something we cannot afford, we grow poorer, whatever our resources. And every time we feel satisfied with what we have, we can be counted as rich, however little we may actually possess.
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There may be significant things to learn about people by looking at what annoys them most.
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I am in general a very pessimistic person with an optimistic, day to day take on things. The bare facts of life are utterly terrifying. And yet, one can laugh. Indeed, one has to laugh precisely because of the darkness: the nervous laughter of the trenches.
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We may not agree with what religions are trying to teach us, but we can admire the institutional way in which they're doing it.
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Architects themselves tend to shy away from the word, preferring instead to talk about the manipulation of space.
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Writing a book has about it some of the anxiety of telling a joke and having to wait several years to know whether or not it was funny.
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Once I began to consider everything as being of potential interest, objects released latent layers of value.
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Maturity: the confidence to have no opinions on many things.
Alain de Botton