At the heart of every frustration lies a basic structure: the collision of a wish with an unyielding reality.
ALAIN DE BOTTON
Rage is caused by a conviction, almost comic in its optimistic origins (however tragic in its effects), that a given frustration has not been written into the contract of life.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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At the heart of every frustration lies a basic structure: the collision of a wish with an unyielding reality.
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Good books put a finger on emotions that are deeply our own – but that we could never have described on our own.
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Everyone wants a better life: very few of us want to be better people.
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It is by finding out what something is not that one comes closest to understanding what it is.
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The only way to be happy is to realise how much depends on how you look at things
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Kant and Hegel are interesting thinkers. But I am happy to insist that they are also terrible writers.
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When Proust urges us to evaluate the world properly, he repeatedly reminds us of the value of modest scenes.
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The media insists on taking what someone didn’t mean to say as being far closer to the truth than what they did.
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These inventors were elevating the formulation of entrepreneurial ideas to the status of a visionary activity. Though forced to justify their efforts in the pragmatic language of venture capital, they were at heart utopian thinkers intent on transforming the world.
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One’s doing well if age improves even slightly one’s capacity to hold on to that vital truism: “This too shall pass.
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We are not always humiliated by failing; we are humiliated only if we first invest our pride and sense of worth in a given achievement and then do not reach it.
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I am in general a very pessimistic person with an optimistic, day to day take on things. The bare facts of life are utterly terrifying. And yet, one can laugh. Indeed, one has to laugh precisely because of the darkness: the nervous laughter of the trenches.
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We each appear to hold within ourselves a range of divergent views as to our native qualities.. And amid such uncertainty, we typically turn to the wider world to settle the question of our significance.. we seem beholden to affections of others to endure ourselves.
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The dream of the news is that it makes us care about other people and situations. But we cannot identify with people to whom we haven’t been introduced. Humans will only respond to art, to people who are skilled in making you care.
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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.
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Only by declaring a book completely finished can one start to see how much remains to be done on it.
ALAIN DE BOTTON