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"Blessed with riches and possibilities far beyond anything imagined by ancestors who tilled the unpredictable soil of medieval Europe, modern populations have nonetheless shown a remarkable capacity to feel that neither who they are nor what they have is quite enough."
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"In Rome you long for the country. In the country you praise to the skies the distant town."
"Humans are forever discontent-always thinking there are better alternatives to their present circumstances."
"Personal discontent and lost illusion is the catalysis and the principal theme for every book ever written. The sign of maturity is when a person finally realizes that they would rather live truthfully than persist indulging his or her comforting delusions."
"Long, I am woman who speaks but one language, the language of the fall--discontentment and self-condemnation, the critical eye and the never satisfied."
"When your focus on earth is only on material things and earthly blessings you will never be satisfied."
"The thirst to know and understand, a large and liberal discontent."
"He that is discontented in one place will seldom be happy in another."
Explore more quotes by Alain de Botton
"We are tempted to believe that certain achievements and possessions will give us enduring satisfaction. We are invited to imagine ourselves scaling the steep cliff face of happiness in order to reach a wide, high plateau on which we will live out the rest of our lives; we are not reminded that soon after gaining the summit, we will be called down again into fresh lowlands of anxiety and desire."
"Differ though we might with Christianity's view of what precisely our souls need, it is hard to discredit the provocative underlying thesis, which seems no less relevant in the secular realm than in the religious one--that we have within us a precious, childlike, vulnerable core which we should nourish and nurture on its turbulent journey through life."
"Marriage: a deeply peculiar and ultimately unkind thing to inflict on anyone one claims to care for."
"The death of marriage has been announced so often and would seem so normal, in a sense. So what's surprising is the sheer longevity and tenacity of this institution."
"To grow interested in any piece of information, we need somewhere to 'put' it, which means some way of connecting it to an issue we already now how to care about."
"...workplace dynamics are no less complicated or unexpectedly intense than family relations, with only the added difficulty that whereas families are at least well-recognised and sanctioned loci for hysteria reminiscent of scenes from Medea, office life typically proceeds behind a mask of shallow cheerfulness, leaving workers grievously unprepared to handle the fury and sadness continually aroused by their colleagues."
"Yet in reality, the likelihood of reaching the pinnacle of capitalist society today is only marginally better than were the chances of being accepted into the French nobility four centuries ago, though at least an aristocratic age was franker, and therefore kinder, about the odds. It did not relentlessly play up the possibilities open to all those with a take on the future of the potato crisp, and so, in turn, did not cruelly equate an ordinary life with a failed one.Our era is perverse in passing off an exception as a rule."
"Those who divorce aren't necessarily the most unhappy, just those neatly able to believe their misery is caused by one other person."
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