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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.

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
Might
Negative
Difficulties
Feel
Failure
Embarrassed
Feels
Positive
Root
Mean
Cutting
Arise
Every
Grow
Plant
Choking
Would
Grows
Difficulty
Choke
Beautiful
Roots
Simultaneously
Anything
Elements
Stem

More quotes by 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.
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Happiness is impossible for longer than 15 minutes. We are the descendants of creatures who, above all else, worried.
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For all his understanding of worldly concerns, when it came to fathoming the deeper meaning of his own furious activity, Sir Bob displayed the sort of laziness for which he himself had no patience in others. He appeared to have only a passing interest in the overall purpose of his financial accumulation.
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It is by finding out what something is not that one comes closest to understanding what it is.
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The dream of the news is that it makes us care about other people and situations. But we cannot identify with people to whom we haven't been introduced. Humans will only respond to art, to people who are skilled in making you care.
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I was foreign and Jewish, with a funny name, and was very small and hated sport, a real problem at an English prep school. So the way to get round it was to become the school joker, which I did quite effectively - I was always fooling around to make the people who would otherwise dump me in the loo laugh.
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When Proust urges us to evaluate the world properly, he repeatedly reminds us of the value of modest scenes.
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Most of us still caged within careers chosen for us by our not entirely worldly 18-22 year old selves.
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People who readily accept the need for a gym will resist that their personalities might need some work too.
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If one felt successful, there'd be so little incentive to be successful.
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Intuition is unconscious accumulated experience informing judgement in real time.
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In the works of Lucretius, we find two reasons why we shouldn't worry about death. If you have had a successful life, Lucretius tell us, there's no reason to mind its end. And, if you haven't had a good time, Why do you seek to add more years, which would also pass but ill?
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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.
Alain de Botton
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Distress at losing an object can be as much a frustration at the intellectual mystery of the disappearance as about the loss itself.
Alain de Botton
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It is striking how much more seriously we are likely to be taken after we have been dead a few centuries.
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A dominant impulse on encountering beauty is to wish to hold on to it, to possess it and give it weight in one’s life. There is an urge to say, ‘I was here, I saw this and it mattered to me.
Alain de Botton
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I assemble my ideas in pieces on a computer file, then gradually find a place for them on a piece of scaffolding I erect.
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The lesson? To respond to the unexpected and hurtful behavior of others with something more than a wipe of the glasses, to see it as a chance to expand our understanding.
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Because the rhythm of conversation makes no allowance for dead periods, because the presence of others calls for continuous responses, we are left to regret the inanity of what we say, and the missed opportunity of what we do not.
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Work finally begins when the fear of doing nothing exceeds the fear of doing it badly.
Alain de Botton