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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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Alain de Botton
Age: 55
Born: 1969
Born: December 20
Journalist
Philosopher
Publisher
Writer
City of Zurich
Alain De Botton
Badly
Begins
Finally
Fear
Nothing
Writing
Work
Exceeds
Exceed

More quotes by Alain de Botton

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Everyone returns us to a different sense of ourselves, for we become a little of who they think we are.
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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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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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Happiness may be difficult to obtain. The obstacles are not primarily financial.
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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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Most victories are, in the best way, acts of revenge.
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Bad art might be defined as a series of bad choices about what to show and what to leave out.
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Man seems merely dust postponed: the sublime as an encounter - pleasurable, intoxicating, even - with human weakness in the face of strength, age and size of the universe.
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We may seek a fortune for no greater reason than to secure the respect and attention of people who would otherwise look straight through us.
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Our minds are susceptible to the influence of external voices telling us what we require to be satisfied, voices that may drown out the faint sounds emitted by our souls and distract us from the careful, arduous task of accurately naming our priorities.
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You have to be quite heavily invested in someone to do them the honour of telling them you're annoyed with them.
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We wanted to test each other's capacity for survival: only if we had tried in vain to destroy one another would we know we were safe.
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Instead of bringing back 1600 plants, we might return from our journeys with a collection of small unfêted but life-enhancing thoughts.
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Bitterness: anger that forgot where it came from.
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Forgiveness requires a sense that bad behaviour is a sign of suffering rather than malice.
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The telephone becomes an instrument of torture in the demonic hands of a beloved who doesn't call.
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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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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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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.
Alain de Botton
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Envy: a confused, tangled guide to one's own ambitions.
Alain de Botton