Quotes of Alain - somelinesforyou

“ We have to be wholly at peace with the prospect of many years of solitude in order to be appropriately picky; otherwise, we risk loving no longer being single rather more than we love the partner who spared us that fate. ”

- Alain de Botton

“ Our fear of messing up should give way to the only real danger there is, that of never trying. ”

- Alain de Botton

“ Everyone is afraid – even those who frighten us. ”

- Alain de Botton

“ Confidence begins with a capacity to forgive oneself for the horrors of the first go. ”

- Alain de Botton

“ Confidence is a skill, not a gift from the gods. ”

- Alain de Botton

“ Love is not just admiration for strength, it is also tolerance for weakness and recognition of ambivalence. ”

- Alain de Botton

“ Work finally begins when the fear of doing nothing exceeds the fear of doing it badly. ”

- Alain de Botton

“ Loneliness is a tax we have to pay to atone for a certain complexity of mind. ”

- Alain de Botton

“ Enduring loneliness is almost invariably better than suffering the compromises of false community. ”

- Alain de Botton

“ It is in dialogue with pain that many beautiful things acquire their value. ”

- Alain de Botton

“ The good life is not one immune to sadness but one in which suffering contributes to our development. ”

- Alain de Botton

“ Feeling lost, crazy and desperate belongs to a good life as much as optimism, certainty and reason. ”

- Alain de Botton

“ Modern society tends to emphasize buoyancy and cheerfulness but we have to admit that reality is, for the most part, about grief and loss. ”

- Alain de Botton

“ At the heart of every frustration lies a basic structure: the collision of a wish with an unyielding reality. ”

- Alain de Botton

“ When two people part, it is the one who is not in love who makes the tender speeches. ”

- Alain de Botton

“ The melancholy facts shouldn’t make us desperate, rather more forgiving, kinder, and better able to focus on what really matters, while there is still time. ”

- Alain de Botton

“ Writing a book is like telling a joke and having to wait 2 years to know whether or not it was funny. ”

- Alain de Botton

“ The difference between hope and despair is a different way of telling stories from the same facts. ”

- 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

“ We should learn to accommodate ourselves to “wrongness”, striving always to adopt a more forgiving, humorous and kindly perspective on its multiple examples in ourselves and in our partners. ”

- Alain de Botton

“ To forgive is to understand the origins of evil and cruelty. ”

- Alain de Botton

“ There are difficult things about you too. ”

- Alain de Botton

“ You too are a deeply imperfect and questionable individual. ”

- Alain de Botton

“ Forgiveness requires a sense that bad behaviour is a sign of suffering rather than malice. ”

- Alain de Botton

“ Anyone who isn’t embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn’t learning enough. ”

- Alain de Botton

“ We are living in a world where everything is based on security. ”

- Alain Robert

“ Though it may feel otherwise, enjoying life is no more dangerous than apprehending it with continuous anxiety and gloom. ”

- Alain de Botton

“ The largest part of what we call ‘personality’ is determined by how we’ve opted to defend ourselves against anxiety and sadness. ”

- Alain de Botton

“ Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone – and finding that that’s ok with them. ”

- 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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