Quote

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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Alain de Botton
Age: 55
Born: 1969
Born: December 20
Journalist
Philosopher
Publisher
Writer
City of Zurich
Alain De Botton
Present
Wish
Pain
Come
Humiliation
Must
Gaps
Envy
Anxiety

More quotes by Alain de Botton

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Our homes do not have to offer us permanent occupancy or store our clothes to merit the name. To speak of home in relation to a building is simply to recognise its harmony with our own prized internal song. Home can be an airport or a library, a garden or a motorway diner.
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I know a lot about writing, but I don't know much about how other industries work. I've tried to use my naivety to my advantage.
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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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Life gives us no such handy markers - a storm comes, and far from this being a harbinger of death and collapse, during its course a person discovers love and truth, beauty and happiness, the rain lashing at the windows all the while.
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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.
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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.
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A good half of the art of living is resilience.
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There may be significant things to learn about people by looking at what annoys them most.
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What am I supposed to do here? What am I supposed to think?
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Most victories are, in the best way, acts of revenge.
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Happiness may be difficult to obtain. The obstacles are not primarily financial.
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We should keep a careful diary of our moments of envy: they are our covert guides to what we should try to do next.
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We are sensitized by the books we read. And the more books we read, and the deeper their lessons sink into us, the more pairs of glasses we have. And those glasses enable us to see things we would have otherwise missed.
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Work is most fulfilling when you're at the comfortable, exciting edge of not quite knowing what you are doing.
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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 most unbearable thing about many successful people is not - as we flatteringly think - how lazy they are, but how hard they work.
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I'm also interested in the modern suggestion that you can have a combination of love and sex in a marriage - which no previous society has ever believed.
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It's hard loving those who don't much like themselves: If you're so great, why would you think I'm so great.
Alain de Botton
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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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Serious journalists often imagine society is adrift because people don't know certain things. Yet often, they know but just don't care. So the task of serious journalism isn't just to lay out truths. It is to make vital truths compelling to a big audience.
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