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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: 54
Born: 1969
Born: December 20
Journalist
Philosopher
Publisher
Writer
City of Zurich
Alain De Botton
People
Lazy
Successful
Many
Hard
Thing
Work
Think
Thinking
Unbearable
More quotes by Alain de Botton
What should worry us is not the number of people that oppose us, but how good their reasons are for doing so.
Alain de Botton
Let death find us as we are building up our matchstick protests against its waves.
Alain de Botton
Only as we mature does affection begin to depend on achievement.
Alain de Botton
I thought about societies where exceptional fortunes are built up in industries with very little connection to out sincere and significant needs, industries where it is difficult to escape from the disparity between a seriousness of means and a triviality of ends.
Alain de Botton
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.
Alain de Botton
It is perhaps sad books that best console us when we are sad, and to lonely service stations that we should drive when there is no one for us to hold or love.
Alain de Botton
Reputation matters so much only because people so seldom think for themselves.
Alain de Botton
The good parent: someone who doesn't mind, for a time, being hated by their children.
Alain de Botton
One of the unexpectedly important things that art can do for us is to teach us how to suffer more successfully.
Alain de Botton
Kant and Hegel are interesting thinkers. But I am happy to insist that they are also terrible writers.
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
The attentions of others matter to us because we are afflicted by a congenital uncertainty as to our own value, as a result of which affliction we tend to allow others' appraisals to play a determining role in how we see ourselves. Our sense of identity is held captive by the judgements of those we live among.
Alain de Botton
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.
Alain de Botton
Envy: a confused, tangled guide to one's own ambitions.
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
We are certainly influenced by role models, and if we are surrounded by images of beautiful rich people, we will start to think that to be beautiful and rich is very important - just as in the Middle Ages, people were surrounded by images of religious piety.
Alain de Botton
Unnatural to expect that learning to be happy should be any easier than, say, learning to play the violin or require any less practice.
Alain de Botton
We are sad at home and blame the weather and the ugliness of the buildings, but on the tropical island we learn that the state of the skies and the appearance of our dwellings can never on their own underwrite our joy nor condemn us to misery.
Alain de Botton
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.
Alain de Botton
Architects themselves tend to shy away from the word, preferring instead to talk about the manipulation of space.
Alain de Botton
