An understandable hunger for … potential clients tempts many [career counseling therapists] to overpromise, like creative writing teachers who, out o… - Alain de Botton
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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.
Alain de Botton (born 20 December 1969) is a Swiss-born British philosopher and author. His books and television programs discuss various contemporary subjects and themes in a philosophical style, emphasizing philosophy's relevance to everyday life. De Botton comes from a Sephardic Jewish family, originating from a small Castilian town of Boton (now vanished) on the Iberian peninsula.
Biography information from
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Portrait adapted from
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What we find exotic abroad may be what we hunger for in vain at home.
They therefore have no opportunity to suffer the interval between desire and gratification which the less privileged endure, and which, for all its apparent unpleasantness, has the incalculable benefit of allowing people to know and fall deeply in love with paintings in Dresden, hats, dressing gowns, and someone who isn’t free this evening.
think that life would suddenly seem wonderful to us if we were threatened to die as you say. Just think of how many projects, travels, love affairs, studies, it — our life — hides from us, made invisible by our laziness which, certain of a future, delays them incessantly. But let all this threaten to become impossible for ever, how beautiful it would become again! Ah! if only the cataclysm doesn’t happen this time, we won’t miss visiting the new galleries of the Louvre, throwing ourselves at the feet of Miss X, making a trip to India. The cataclysm doesn’t happen, we don’t do any of it, because we find ourselves back in the heart of normal life, where negligence deadens desire. And yet we shouldn’t have needed the cataclysm to love life today. It would have been enough to think that we are humans, and that death may come this evening.
