Quote

At the heart of every frustration lies a basic structure: the collision of a wish with an unyielding reality.

Alain de Botton

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Alain de Botton
Age: 55
Born: 1969
Born: December 20
Journalist
Philosopher
Publisher
Writer
City of Zurich
Alain De Botton
Reality
Unyielding
Heart
Collision
Every
Frustration
Basic
Structure
Lies
Lying
Wish

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Being funny should be an incidental byproduct of trying to get to something truthful, not a destination in itself.
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Happiness may be difficult to obtain. The obstacles are not primarily financial.
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The moment we cry in a film is not when things are sad but when they turn out to be more beautiful than we expected them to be.
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A good half of the art of living is resilience.
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He was marked out by his relentless ability to find fault with others' mediocrity - suggesting that a certain type of intelligence may be at heart nothing more or less than a superior capacity for dissatisfaction.
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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.
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The most unbearable thing about many successful people is not - as we flatteringly think - how lazy they are, but how hard they work.
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As we write, so we build: to keep a record of what matters to us.
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Dreams reveal we never quite get 'over' anything: it's all still in there somewhere.
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As adults, we try to develop the character traits that would have rescued our parents.
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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.
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It is in books, poems, paintings which often give us the confidence to take seriously feelings in ourselves that we might otherwise never have thought to acknowledge.
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Most of our childhood is stored not in photos, but in certain biscuits, lights of day, smells, textures of carpet.
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To cut out every negative root would simultaneously mean choking off positive elements that might arise from it further up the stem of the plant. We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them.
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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.
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Life gives us no such handy markers - a storm comes, and far from this being a harbinger of death and collapse, during its course a person discovers love and truth, beauty and happiness, the rain lashing at the windows all the while.
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The longing for a destiny is no nowhere stronger than in our romantic life. All too often forced to share our bed with those who cannot fathom our soul, can we not be forgiven if we believe ourselves fated to stumble one day upon the man or woman of our dreams.
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Many moments in religion seem attractive to me even though I can't believe in any of it.
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What we find exotic abroad may be what we hunger for in vain at home.
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We envy only those whom we feel ourselves to be like we envy only members of our reference group. There are few successes more unendurable than those of our close friends.
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