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: 54
Born: 1969
Born: December 20
Journalist
Philosopher
Publisher
Writer
City of Zurich
Alain De Botton
Heart
Collision
Every
Frustration
Basic
Structure
Lies
Lying
Wish
Reality
Unyielding

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True love is a lack of desire to check one's smartphone in another's presence.
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Writing isn’t a career choice. It’s self-medication that over time precipitates the madness it was meant to ward off.
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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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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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When work is not going well, it's useful to remember that our identities stretch beyond what is on the business card, that we were people long before we became workers - and will continue to be human once we have put our tools down forever.
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Don't despair: despair suggests you are in total control and know what is coming. You don't - surrender to events with hope.
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Bitterness: anger that forgot where it came from.
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Newspapers are being read all around. The point is not, of course, to glean new information, but rather to coax the mind out of its sleep-induced introspective temper.
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Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone - and finding that that's ok with them.
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A good half of the art of living is resilience.
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Because the rhythm of conversation makes no allowance for dead periods, because the presence of others calls for continuous responses, we are left to regret the inanity of what we say, and the missed opportunity of what we do not.
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There is always the option of being emotionally lazy, that is, of quoting.
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The only possible way to begin a book is to tell oneself that its eventual failure is guaranteed — but survivable.
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Most anger stems from feelings of weakness, sadness and fear: hard to remember when one is at the receiving end of its defiant roar.
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Envy: a confused, tangled guide to one's own ambitions.
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All tours are filled with humiliation. My publisher once hired a private jet to fly me to a venue where 1,000 people were waiting. It almost bankrupted him.
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We read the weird tales in newspapers to crowd out the even weirder stuff inside us.
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It seems that most of us could benefit from a brush with a near-fatal disaster to help us recognise the important things that we are too defeated or embittered to recognise from day to day.
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In their different ways, art and philosophy help us, in Schopenhauer's words, to turn pain into knowledge.
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We need a home in the psychological sense as much as we need one in the physical: to compensate for a vulnerability. We need a refuge to shore up our states of mind, because so much of the world is opposed to our allegiances. We need our rooms to align us to desirable versions of ourselves and to keep alive the important, evanescent sides of us.
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