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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
Nothing
Writing
Work
Exceeds
Exceed
Badly
Begins
Finally
Fear

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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A successful work will draw out the features capable of exciting a sense of beauty and interest in the spectator.
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We are continuously challenged to discover new works of culture—and, in the process, we don’t allow any one of them to assume a weight in our minds.
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Many moments in religion seem attractive to me even though I can't believe in any of it.
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It wasn't only fanatics and drunkards who began conversations with strangers in public.
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One of the best protections against disappointment is to have a lot going on.
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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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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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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.
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Every adult life could be said to be defined by two great love stories: the story of our quest for sexual love and the story of our quest for love from the world.
Alain de Botton
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Artistic accounts involve severe abbreviations of what reality will force upon us.
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Sweetness is the opposite of machismo, which is everywhere-and I really don't get on with machismo. I'm interested in sensitivity, and weakness, and fear, and anxiety, because I think that, at the end of the day, behind our masks, that's what we are.
Alain de Botton
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Never too late to learn some embarrassingly basic, stupidly obvious things about oneself.
Alain de Botton
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to design means forcing ourselves to unlearn what we believe we already know, patiently to take apart the mechanisms behind our reflexes and to acknowledge the mystery and stupefying complexity of everyday gestures like switching off a light of turning on a tap
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I am conscious of trying to stretch the boundaries of non-fiction writing. It's always surprised me how little attention many non-fiction writers pay to the formal aspects of their work.
Alain de Botton
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We each appear to hold within ourselves a range of divergent views as to our native qualities.. And amid such uncertainty, we typically turn to the wider world to settle the question of our significance.. we seem beholden to affections of others to endure ourselves.
Alain de Botton
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If our lives are dominated by a search for happiness, then perhaps few activities reveal as much about the dynamics of this quest - in all its ardour and paradoxes - than our travels.
Alain de Botton
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Bad architecture is in the end as much a failure of psychology as of design. It is an example expressed through materials of the same tendencies which in other domains will lead us to marry the wrong people, choose inappropriate jobs and book unsuccessful holidays: the tendency not to understand who we are and what will satisfy us.
Alain de Botton
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The secular world is full of holes. We have secularized badly.
Alain de Botton
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Politics is so difficult, it's generally only people who aren't quite up to the task who feel convinced they are.
Alain de Botton