“And I wondered, with mounting anxiety, What am I supposed to do here? What am I supposed to think?” — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“It is precisely when we hear little from our partner which frightens, shocks or sickens us that we should begin to be… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
The fear of saying something stupid (which stupid people never have) has censored far more good ideas than bad ones. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
What kills us isn't one big thing, but thousands of tiny obligations we can't turn down for fear of disappointing others. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Though it may feel otherwise, enjoying life is no more dangerous than apprehending it with continuous anxiety and gloom. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Most anger stems from feelings of weakness, sadness and fear: hard to remember when one is at the receiving end of its… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“The fear of forgetting anything precious can trigger in us the wish to raise a structure, like a paperweight to hold down… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
The price we have paid for expecting to be so much more than our ancestors is a perpetual anxiety that we are… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“A sharp decline in actual deprivation may, paradoxically, have been accompanied by an ongoing and even escalating sense of fear of deprivation.” — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Objectively good spaces to work rarely end up being so; in their faultlessness, quiet and well-equipped studios have a habit of rendering… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“We start off in childhood believing parents might have access to a superior kind of knowledge and experience. They look, for a… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
The inability to live in the present lies in the fear of leaving the sheltered position of anticipation or memory, and so… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“Our fear of failing at various tasks would likely be much less were it not for our awareness of how harshly failure… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Work finally begins when the fear of doing nothing exceeds the fear of doing it badly. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Sweetness is the opposite of machismo, which is everywhere-and I really don't get on with machismo. I'm interested in sensitivity, and weakness,… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“[T]he unsympathetic assessments we make of others are usually the result of nothing more sinister than our habit of looking at them… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Status Anxiety: A worry, so pernicious as to be capable of ruining extended stretches of our lives, that we are in danger… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“We might imagine that the fear and insecurity of getting close to someone would happen only once, at the start of a… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“To be mature is, we're told, to move beyond possessiveness. Jealousy is for babies. The mature person knows that no one owns anyone.” — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“He feared that by leaving her he would ruin her life - so he stayed, and did just that.” — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
“The Anxiety of Sunday afternoon: your unlived lives and infinite possibility pressing upon the constraints of reality.” — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
“We could not be fulfilled if we weren't inauthentic some of the time—inauthentic, that is, in relation to such things as our passing desires… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“Insofar as we appreciate order, it is when we perceive it as being accompanied by complexity, when we feel that a variety of elements… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
I like the values associated with a medical family - common sense, being practical but also thoughtful. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“Anyone who urgently needs us deserves, in the true book of love, to be our friend.” — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“We can then recognize that we invented religions to serve two central needs which continue to this day and which secular society has not… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“Half the ingratitude and complacency in the world down to how slowly and imperceptibly most good and bad things unfold.” — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
It is perhaps when our lives are at their most problematic that we are likely to be most receptive to beautiful things. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
![“[T]he unsympathetic assessments we make of others are usually the result of nothing more sinister than our habit of looking at them in the wrong way, through lenses clouded by distraction, exhaustion and fear, which blind us to the fact that they are really, despite a thousand differences, just…” quote by Alain de Botton](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/c16/alain-de-botton-221_altered_t-he-unsympathetic-assessments-we-make-o_2167022.jpg)
