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  • Alain de Botton Quotes   372
  • .. if you asked most people whether they believed in love or not, they’d probably say they didn’t. Yet that’s not necessarily what they truly think. It’s just the way they defend themselves against what they want. They believe in it, but pretend they don’t until they’re allowed to. Most people would throw away all their cynicism if they could. The majority just never gets the chance.
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Believe Quotes , Thinking Quotes
  • An understandable hunger for potential clients tempts many [career counseling therapists] to overpromise, like creative writing teachers who, out of greed or sentimentality, sometimes imply that all of their students could one day produce worthwhile literature, rather than frankly acknowledging the troubling truth, anathema to a democratic society, that the great writer, like the contented worker, remains an erratic and anomalous event, immune to the methods of factory farming.
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Teacher Quotes , Writing Quotes
  • The origins and travels of our purchases remain matters of indifference, although to the more imaginative at least a slight dampness at the bottom of a carton, or an obscure code printed along a computer cable, may hint at processes of manufacture and transport nobler and more mysterious, more worthy of wonder and study, than the very goods themselves.
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Hints Quotes , May Quotes
  • I was foreign and Jewish, with a funny name, and was very small and hated sport, a real problem at an English prep school. So the way to get round it was to become the school joker, which I did quite effectively - I was always fooling around to make the people who would otherwise dump me in the loo laugh.
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Sports Quotes , Real Quotes
  • Life seems to be a process of replacing one anxiety with another and substituting one desire for another--which is not to say that we should never strive to overcome any of our anxieties or fulfil any of our desires, but rather to suggest that we should perhaps build into our strivings an awareness of the way our goals promise us a respite and a resolution that they cannot, by definition, deliver.
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Goal Quotes , Anxiety Quotes