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"Logically enough, the office and the nunnery have been singularly popular in the imaginations of pornographers. We should not be surprised to learn that the erotic novels of the early modern period were overwhelmingly focused on debauchery and flagellation amongst clergy in vespers and chapels, just as contemporary Internet pornography is inordinately concerned with fellatios and sodomies performed by office workers against a backdrop of work stations and computer equipment."
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Explore more quotes by Alain de Botton
"In Britain, because I live here, I can also run into problems of envy and competition. But all this is just in a day's work for a writer. You can't put stuff out there without someone calling you a complete fool. Oh, well."
Work
"We may seek a fortune for no greater reason than to secure the respect and attention of people who would otherwise look straight through us."
People
"It is according to how we are able to answer the question of what we do (normally the first enquiry we will have to field in any new acquaintance) that the quality of our reception is likely to be decided."
Identity
"We don't need to be constantly reasonable in order to have good relationships; all we need to have mastered is the occasional capacity to acknowledge with good grace that we may, in one or two areas, be somewhat insane."
Relationship
"Loneliness makes us more capable of true intimacy if ever better opportunities do come along. We might be isolated for now, but we'll be capable of far closer, more interesting bonds with anyone we do eventually locate."
Relationship
"There is something improbably about the silence in the [subway] carriage, considering how naturally gregarious we are as a species. Still, how much kinder it is for the commuters to pretend to be absorbed in other things, rather than revealing the extent to which they are covertly evaluating, judging, condemning and desiring each other. A few venture a glance here and there, as furtively as birds pecking grain. But only if the train crashed would anyone know for sure who else had been in the carriage, what small parts of the nation's economy had been innocuously seated across the aisle just before the impact: employees of hotels, government ministries, plastic-surgery clinics, fruit nurseries and greetings-card companies."
Society
"Our minds are susceptible to the influence of external voices telling us what we require to be satisfied, voices that may drown out the faint sounds emitted by our souls and distract us from the careful, arduous task of accurately naming our priorities."
Mind
"Art was the very antithesis of crass moralism."
Art
"The essence of art is that its one case applies to thousands,' knew Schopenhauer."
Art
"There is a danger of developing a blanket distaste for modern life which could have its attractions but lack the all-important images to help us identify them."
Culture
Exlpore more Satire quotes
"I don't want to see him alone. He says things that annoy me. He gives me good advice."
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Personal Development
"He [Old Mr. Turveydrop] was a fat old gentleman with a false complexion, false teeth, false whiskers, and a wig. He had a fur collar, and he had a padded breast to his coat, which only wanted a star or a broad blue ribbon to be complete. He was pinched in, and swelled out, and got up, and strapped down, as much as he could possibly bear."
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"The god's chosen beverage. Tremble before the horror of Diet Coke!"
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Personal Development
"If more Africans had eaten missionaries, the continent would be in better shape."
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"Not all. Some of them he probably lectured to death."
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Personal Development
"On the Kite, the situation was being 'workshopped'. This is the means by which people who don't know anything get together to pool their ignorance."
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Personal Development
"Or he'd watch the news: more plagues, more famines, more floods, more insect or microbe or small-mammal outbreaks, more droughts, more chickenshit boy-soldier wars in distant countries. Why was everything so much like itself?"
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Personal Development
"I think that we may safely trust a good deal more than we do."
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Personal Development
"What are American dry-goods? asked the duchess, raising her large hands in wonder and accentuating the verb.American novels, answered Lord Henry."
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Personal Development
"Now-a-days, men wear a fool's cap, and call it a liberty cap."
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Personal Development
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