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Famous Alain de Botton Quotes
“Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone - and finding that that's ok with them.”
“Being content is perhaps no less easy than playing the violin well: and requires no less practice.”
“Never too late to learn some embarrassingly basic, stupidly obvious things about oneself.”
“We read the weird tales in newspapers to crowd out the even weirder stuff inside us.”
“One of the best protections against disappointment is to have a lot going on.”
“Intuition is unconscious accumulated experience informing judgement in real time.”
“Cynics are - beneath it all - only idealists with awkwardly high standards.”
“The only people we can think of as normal are those we don't yet know very well.”
“The difference between hope and despair is a different way of telling stories from the same facts.”
“Forgiveness requires a sense that bad behaviour is a sign of suffering rather than malice.”
“The best cure for one's bad tendencies is to see them in action in another person.”
“A notorious inability to express emotions makes human beings the only animals capable of suicide.”
“There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life.”
“We keep a special place in our hearts for people who refuse to be impressed by us.”
“Dreams reveal we never quite get 'over' anything: it's all still in there somewhere.”
“There may be significant things to learn about people by looking at what annoys them most.”
“To one's enemies: "I hate myself more than you ever could.”