It's great when you finally realize that being miserable doesn't protect you from bad stuff happening.

—Alain de Botton

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About Alain de Botton

Portrait of Alain de Botton

Alain de Botton (; born 20 December 1969) is a Swiss-born British author and public speaker. His books discuss various contemporary subjects and themes, emphasizing philosophy's relevance to everyday life. He published Essays in Love (1993), which went on to sell two million copies. Other bestsellers include How Proust Can...

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You get down to work when the fear of having done nothing finally exceeds the fear of doing it wrong.

—Alain de Botton

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fear accomplishment error work

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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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love perfection imperfection health

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The prestige of the news is founded on the unstated assumption that our lives are forever poised on the verge of critical transformation thanks to the two driving forces of modern history: politics and technology.

—Alain de Botton in Religion for Atheists

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We all possess wisdom that we lack the strength properly to enact in our lives.

—Alain de Botton in Religion for Atheists

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A lack of freedom is no longer, in most developed societies, the problem. Our downfall lies in our inability to make the most of the freedom that our ancestors painfully secured for us over three centuries.

—Alain de Botton in Religion for Atheists

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More quotations tagged with “sadness”

People always think they know other people, but they don't. Not really. I mean, maybe they know things about them, like they won't eat doughnuts or they like action movies or whatever. But they don't know what their friends do in their rooms alone at night or what happened to them when they were kids or if they feel sad for no reason at all.

—Libba Bray in Going Bovine

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We build statues out of snow, and weep to see them melt.

—Walter Scott

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Tenderness contains an element of sadness. It is not the sadness of feeling sorry for yourself or feeling deprived, but it is a natural situation of fullness. You feel so full and rich, as if you were about to shed tears. Your eyes are full of tears, and the moment you blink, the tears will spill out of your eyes and roll down your cheeks. In order to be a good warrior, one has to feel this sad and tender heart.

—Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche

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Sometimes we get so used to not really feeling anything, just going with the flow, that we forget how it feels to be really happy or sad.

—Lindsey Kelk in I Heart New York

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Despair is a greater deceiver than hope.

—Marqui de Vauvenargues

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