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People who go on to be writers are those who can forgive themselves the horror of the first draft.

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
Forgive
Forgiving
Horror
Writers
Firsts
First
People
Draft

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To one's enemies: I hate myself more than you ever could.
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Must being in love always mean being in pain?
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The more dignity is widely and freely available in a society, the less people want to be famous.
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Our greatest furies spring from events which violate our sense of the ground of our existence.
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...if the beginnings of love and amorous politics are equally rosy, then the ends may be equally bloody.
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We envy only those whom we feel ourselves to be like we envy only members of our reference group. There are few successes more unendurable than those of our close friends.
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If one felt successful, there'd be so little incentive to be successful.
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Sublime places repeat in grand terms a lesson that ordinary life typically teaches viciously: that the universe is mightier than we are, that we are frail and temporary and have no alternative but to accept limitations on our will that we must bow to necessities greater than ourselves.
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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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The only possible way to begin a book is to tell oneself that its eventual failure is guaranteed — but survivable.
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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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Getting to the top has an unfortunate tendency to persuade people that the system is OK after all.
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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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Newspapers are being read all around. The point is not, of course, to glean new information, but rather to coax the mind out of its sleep-induced introspective temper.
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There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life.
Alain de Botton
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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.
Alain de Botton
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There is a longing for a return to a time without the need for choices, free of the regret at the inevitable loss that all choice (however wonderful) has entailed.
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I learnt to stop fantasising about the perfect job or the perfect relationship because that can actually be an excuse for not living.
Alain de Botton
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as the determinants of high status keep shifting, so, too, naturally, will the triggers of status anxiety be altered.
Alain de Botton