Alain de Botton Quotes
I … thought about societies where exceptional fortunes are built up in industries with very little connection to out sincere and significant needs, industries where it is difficult to escape from the disparity between a seriousness of means and a triviality of ends.
Quotes to Explore
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I know what to do and I go and execute.
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I have no faith in human perfectability. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active - not more happy - nor more wise, than he was 6000 years ago.
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Fame has become this obsession for people, which kind of creeps me out.
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There are no benefactors in Canada because there is no incentive.
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I want to thank all of the fans and media who made playing in the NFL such a wonderful experience. I have had the pleasure of meeting many of them.
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The way through the world is more difficult to find than the way beyond it.
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Buddhism has had a major effect on who I am and how I think about the world. What I have learned is that I like all religions, but only parts of them.
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Few men desire liberty; most men wish only for a just master.
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When I was in high school in the early 1970s, we knew we were running out of oil; we knew that easy sources were being capped; we knew that diversifying would be much better; we knew that there were terrible dictators and horrible governments that we were enriching who hated us. We knew all that and we did really nothing.
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The last thing I would ever do is try to become a network programmer.
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My mum has lived in Australia for 22 years now, and we have a rocky relationship. But at the same time it's one I want to maintain. I need her to be my mum. The relationship took a lot of rebuilding.
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The things that have really gotten confusing to me is how you balance the desires of your publishers to produce things on a schedule, and people are always sort of giving you ideas on what you should follow up with or how you should proceed next and things like that.
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Things derive their being and nature by mutual dependence and are nothing in themselves.
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It might be, it could be... it is! A home run!
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In very simple language, Morrie always seems to be able to explain something that other people would take a chapter for, you know.
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I am opposed to the military use of animals. I am also opposed to the military use of men.
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I want the news delivered unbiased. I thought that was the whole point with journalism.
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Agatha Christie holds special personal memories for me because my mum, a television producer called Pat Sandys, had been the first person to persaude the Agatha Christie estate to put one of her stories on T.V.
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When I was 18, I took a trip to Thailand with a friend. We stayed for a month. Bangkok was very raw for a teenager: there were no cellphones, no Internet, and the only music I had with me was this cassette by Liz Phair. I was writing a lot of poetry, and she embodied a talky style of songwriting that I found very accessible.
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Not many people do what Jameis Winston did: first year as a starter winning a national championship, only one loss in his two years as a starter. He's got great charisma. He's polarizing for some people, but he's a rare talent.
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Everything that belonged to her husband made her weep again: his tasseled slippers, his pajamas under the pillow, the space of his absence in the dressing table mirror, his own odor on her skin. A vague thought made her shudder: "The people one loves should take all their things with them when they die.
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Passion isn't something that lives way up in the sky, in abstract dreams and hopes. It lives at ground level, in the specific details of what you're doing every day.
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I think growing up in such a small town - before cell phones, before the Internet, before Facebook, before we had access to people's interiors - there was a great deal of space between people's lives. I spent a lot of time imagining into the lives of the people I grew up with.
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I … thought about societies where exceptional fortunes are built up in industries with very little connection to out sincere and significant needs, industries where it is difficult to escape from the disparity between a seriousness of means and a triviality of ends.
