Work is most fulfilling when you're at the comfortable, exciting edge of not quite knowing what you are doing. Alain de Botton More Quotes by Alain de Botton More Quotes From Alain de Botton People who go on to be writers are those who can forgive themselves the horror of the first draft. Alain de Botton forgiving goes-on people Though debts are condemned in the financial world, the world of friendship and love may perversely depend on well-managed debts. Alain de Botton debt love-and-friendship and-love Our sense of what is valuable will hence be radically distorted if we must perpetually condemn as tedious everything we lack, simply because we lack it. Alain de Botton tedious valuable ifs One of the unexpectedly important things that art can do for us is to teach us how to suffer more successfully. Alain de Botton important suffering art The assumption is that life doesn't need to be navigated with lessons. You can just do it intuitively. After all, you only need to achieve autonomy from your parents, find a moderately satisfying job, form a relationship, perhaps raise some children, watch the onset of mortality in your parents' generation and eventually in your own, until one day a fatal illness starts gnawing at your innards and you calmly go to the grave, shut the coffin and are done with the self-evident business of life. Alain de Botton self jobs children One of the best protections against disappointment is to have a lot going on. Alain de Botton protection disappointment 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 ungrateful kissing two The dream of the news is that it makes us care about other people and situations. But we cannot identify with people to whom we haven't been introduced. Humans will only respond to art, to people who are skilled in making you care. Alain de Botton dream people art The more dignity is widely and freely available in a society, the less people want to be famous. Alain de Botton dignity want people Those who divorce aren't necessarily the most unhappy, just those neatly able to believe their misery is caused by one other person. Alain de Botton divorce unhappy believe Never, ever become a writer. It's a nightmare. Alain de Botton nightmare It is this idea 'decency' should be attached to wealth -and 'indecency'' to poverty - that forms the core of one strand of skeptical complaint against the modern status-ideal. Why should failure to make money be taken as a sign of an unconditionally flawed human being rather than of a fiasco in one particular area if the far larger, more multifaceted, project of leading a good life? Why should both wealth and poverty be read as the predominant guides to an individual's morals ? Alain de Botton good-life taken ideas Architects themselves tend to shy away from the word, preferring instead to talk about the manipulation of space. Alain de Botton manipulation shy space 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 imagination world art Man seems merely dust postponed: the sublime as an encounter - pleasurable, intoxicating, even - with human weakness in the face of strength, age and size of the universe. Alain de Botton sublime dust men We might have been ready to offer sympathy, but in actuality there were stronger reasons to want to congratulate her for having found such a powerful motive to feel sad. We should have envied her for having located someone without whom she so firmly felt she could not survive, beyond the gate let along in a bare student bedroom in a suburb of Rio. If she had been able to view her situation from a sufficient distance, she might have been able to recognise this as one of the high points in her life. Alain de Botton distance powerful views The true nature of bureaucracy may be nowhere more obvious to the observer than in a developing country, for only there will it still be made manifest by the full complement of documents, files, veneered desks and cabinets - which convey the strict and inverse relationship between productivity and paperwork. Alain de Botton developing-countries may country If the behaviour of babies and small children is any guide, we emerge into the world with our tendencies to imbalance already well entrenched. In our playpens and high chairs, we are rarely far from displaying either hysterical happiness or savage disappointment, love or rage, mania or exhaustion--and, despite the growth of a more temperate exterior in adulthood, we seldom succeed in laying claim to lasting equilibrium, traversing our lives like stubbornly listing ships on choppy seas. Alain de Botton disappointment baby children A lump rises in our throat at the sight of beauty from an implicit knowledge that the happiness it hints at is the exception. Alain de Botton throat hints sight How generous was it to offer gifts to people one knew would never accept them? Alain de Botton offers accepting people
