Quote

Objectively good spaces to work rarely end up being so in their faultlessness, quiet and well-equipped studios have a habit of rendering the fear of failure overwhelming. Original thoughts are like shy animals. We sometimes have to look the other way - towards a busy street or terminal - before they run out of their burrows.

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
Sometimes
Space
Busy
Shy
Work
Fear
Animals
Overwhelming
Way
Running
Failure
Rarely
Burrows
Good
Ends
Habit
Studios
Objectively
Like
Look
Quiet
Originals
Terminal
Wells
Streets
Original
Rendering
Well
Thoughts
Towards
Equipped
Looks
Animal
Street
Spaces

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Her lie was symptomatic of a certain pride she took in mocking the romantic, in being unsentimental, matter-of-fact, stoic yet at heart she was the oppo site: idealistic, dreamy, giving, and deeply attached to everything she liked verbally to dismiss as mushy.
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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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Though debts are condemned in the financial world, the world of friendship and love may perversely depend on well-managed debts.
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We feel something, and reach out for the nearest phrase or hum with which to communicate, but which fails to do justice to what has induced us to do so....We stay on the outside of our impressions, as if staring at them through a frosted window, superficially related to them, yet estranged from whatever has eluded casual definition.
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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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To cut out every negative root would simultaneously mean choking off positive elements that might arise from it further up the stem of the plant. We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them.
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Do you love me enough that I may be weak with you? Everyone loves strength, but do you love me for my weakness? That is the real test.
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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.
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Happiness may be difficult to obtain. The obstacles are not primarily financial.
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Our homes do not have to offer us permanent occupancy or store our clothes to merit the name. To speak of home in relation to a building is simply to recognise its harmony with our own prized internal song. Home can be an airport or a library, a garden or a motorway diner.
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Most of what makes a book 'good' is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.
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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.
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The architects who benefit us most maybe those generous enough to lay aside their claims to genius in order to devote themselves to assembling graceful but predominantly unoriginal boxes. Architecture should have the confidence and the kindness to be a little boring.
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The degree of sympathy we feel regarding another's fiasco is directly proportional to how easy or difficult it is for us to imagine ourselves, under like circumstances, making a similar mistake.
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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.
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The best cure for one's bad tendencies is to see them in action in another person.
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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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As adults, we try to develop the character traits that would have rescued our parents.
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Being funny should be an incidental byproduct of trying to get to something truthful, not a destination in itself.
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Our greatest furies spring from events which violate our sense of the ground of our existence.
Alain de Botton