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The most unbearable thing about many successful people is not - as we flatteringly think - how lazy they are, but how hard they work.
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
Hard
Thing
Work
Think
Thinking
Unbearable
People
Lazy
Successful
Many
More quotes by Alain de Botton
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
Our jobs make relentless calls on a narrow band of our faculties, reducing our chances of achieving rounded personalities and leaving us to suspect (often in the gathering darkness of a Sunday evening) that much of who we are, or could be, has gone unexplored.
Alain de Botton
The arrogance that says analysing the relationship between reasons and causes is more important than writing a philosophy of shyness or sadness or friendship drives me nuts. I can't accept that.
Alain de Botton
Travel agents would be wiser to ask us what we hope to change about our lives rather than simply where we wish to go.
Alain de Botton
The most attractive are not those who allow us to kiss them at once [we soon feel ungrateful] or those who never allow us to kiss them [we soon forget them], but those who coyly lead us between the two extremes.
Alain de Botton
How generous was it to offer gifts to people one knew would never accept them?
Alain de Botton
Perhaps it is true that we do not really exist until there is someone there to see us existing, we cannot properly speak until there is someone who can understand what we are saying in essence, we are not wholly alive until we are loved.
Alain de Botton
My writing always came out of a very personal place, out of an attempt to stay sane.
Alain de Botton
Memory is... similar to anticipation: an instrument of simplification and selection.
Alain de Botton
Rather than getting more spoilt with age, as difficulties pile up, epiphanies of gratitude abound.
Alain de Botton
There is real danger of a disconnect between what's on your business card and who you are deep inside, and it's not a disconnect that the world is ready to be patient with.
Alain de Botton
We should keep a careful diary of our moments of envy: they are our covert guides to what we should try to do next.
Alain de Botton
To one's enemies: I hate myself more than you ever could.
Alain de Botton
The happiness that may emerge from taking a second look is central to Proust's therapeutic conception. It reveals the extent to which our dissatisfactions may be the result of failing to look properly at our lives rather than the result of anything inherently deficient about them.
Alain de Botton
Literature deserves its prestige for one reason above all others - because it's a tool to help us live and die with a little bit more wisdom, goodness, and sanity.
Alain de Botton
Pick up any newspaper or magazine, open the TV, and you'll be bombarded with suggestions of how to have a successful life. Some of these suggestions are deeply unhelpful to our own projects and priorities - and we should take care.
Alain de Botton
Forgiveness requires a sense that bad behaviour is a sign of suffering rather than malice.
Alain de Botton
We read the weird tales in newspapers to crowd out the even weirder stuff inside us.
Alain de Botton
The telephone becomes an instrument of torture in the demonic hands of a beloved who doesn't call.
Alain de Botton
If it is true that love is the pursuit in another of qualities we lack in ourselves, then in our love of someone from another culture, one ambition may be to weld ourselves more closely to values missing from our own culture.
Alain de Botton
