Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
At the heart of every frustration lies a basic structure: the collision of a wish with an unyielding reality.
Alain de Botton
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Alain de Botton
Age: 54
Born: 1969
Born: December 20
Journalist
Philosopher
Publisher
Writer
City of Zurich
Alain De Botton
Lies
Lying
Wish
Reality
Unyielding
Heart
Collision
Every
Frustration
Basic
Structure
More quotes by Alain de Botton
Pick up any newspaper or magazine, open the TV, and you'll be bombarded with suggestions of how to have a successful life. Some of these suggestions are deeply unhelpful to our own projects and priorities - and we should take care.
Alain de Botton
Let's say you went to Harvard or Oxford or Cambridge, and you said, 'I've come here because I'm in search of morality, guidance and consolation I want to know how to live,' - they would show you the way to the insane asylum.
Alain de Botton
The happiness that may emerge from taking a second look is central to Proust's therapeutic conception. It reveals the extent to which our dissatisfactions may be the result of failing to look properly at our lives rather than the result of anything inherently deficient about them.
Alain de Botton
Wealth is not an absolute. It is relative to desire. Every time we yearn for something we cannot afford, we grow poorer, whatever our resources. And every time we feel satisfied with what we have, we can be counted as rich, however little we may actually possess.
Alain de Botton
Cynics are - beneath it all - only idealists with awkwardly high standards.
Alain de Botton
What is a snob? A snob is anybody who takes a small part of you and uses that to come to a complete vision of who you are. That is snobbery.
Alain de Botton
I feel that the great challenge of our time is the communication of ideas.
Alain de Botton
In the gap between who we wish one day to be and who we are at present, must come pain, anxiety, envy and humiliation.
Alain de Botton
One rarely falls in love without being as much attracted to what is interestingly wrong with someone as what is objectively healthy.
Alain de Botton
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.
Alain de Botton
My writing always came out of a very personal place, out of an attempt to stay sane.
Alain de Botton
It's very hard to respect people on holiday - everybody looks so silly at the beach, it makes you hate humanity - but when you see people at their work they elicit respect, whether it's a mechanic, a stonemason or an accountant.
Alain de Botton
We are certainly influenced by role models, and if we are surrounded by images of beautiful rich people, we will start to think that to be beautiful and rich is very important - just as in the Middle Ages, people were surrounded by images of religious piety.
Alain de Botton
Though debts are condemned in the financial world, the world of friendship and love may perversely depend on well-managed debts.
Alain de Botton
The Arab-Israeli conflict is also in many ways a conflict about status: it's a war between two peoples who feel deeply humiliated by the other, who want the other to respect them. Battles over status can be even more intractable than those over land or water or oil.
Alain de Botton
After 40 (old age for most of man's history), one should strive to be more or less packed and ready to go were the end call to come.
Alain de Botton
Everyone wants a better life: very few of us want to be better people.
Alain de Botton
We may not agree with what religions are trying to teach us, but we can admire the institutional way in which they're doing it.
Alain de Botton
We study biology, physics, movements of glaciers... Where are the classes on envy, feeling wronged, despair, bitterness.
Alain de Botton
Let death find us as we are building up our matchstick protests against its waves.
Alain de Botton
