Alain de Botton
"Work begins when the fear of doing nothing at all finally trumps the terror of doing it badly."
118 Quotes
"Work begins when the fear of doing nothing at all finally trumps the terror of doing it badly."
Alain de Botton
"Most of what makes a book 'good' is that we are reading it at the right moment for us."
Alain de Botton
"The feeling one has no time to get anything done provides the pressure that guarantees one does get some things done."
Alain de Botton
"You have to be quite heavily invested in someone to do them the honour of telling them you're annoyed with them."
Alain de Botton
"Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone - and finding that that's ok with them."
Alain de Botton
"We study biology, physics, movements of glaciers... Where are the classes on envy, feeling wronged, despair, bitterness..."
Alain de Botton
"If one felt successful, there'd be so little incentive to be successful."
Alain de Botton
"One kind of good book should leave you asking: how did the author know that about me?"
Alain de Botton
"The difference between hope and despair is a different way of telling stories from the same facts."
Alain de Botton
"Don't despair: despair suggests you are in total control and know what is coming. You don't - surrender to events with hope."
Alain de Botton
"The materialistic view of happiness of our age starkly revealed in our understanding of the word "luxury."
Alain de Botton
"The media insists on taking what someone didn't mean to say as being far closer to the truth than what they did."
Alain de Botton
"One's doing well if age improves even slightly one's capacity to hold on to that vital truism: "This too shall pass."
Alain de Botton
"The price we have paid for expecting to be so much more than our ancestors is a perpetual anxiety that we are far from being all we might be."
Alain de Botton
"The moment we cry in a film is not when things are sad but when they turn out to be more beautiful than we expected them to be."
Alain de Botton
"There's a whole category of people who miss out by not allowing themselves to be weird enough."
Alain de Botton
"There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life."
Alain de Botton
"One rarely falls in love without being as much attracted to what is interestingly wrong with someone as what is objectively healthy."
Alain de Botton
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