“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.”
Source: The Consolations of Philosophy (2000), Chapter III, Consolation For Frustration, p. 84.
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Alain de Botton 146
Swiss writer 1969Related quotes
"Rock for Sale"; quoted in The Sociology of Rock, Simon Frith, 1978, ISBN 0094602204

From the essay Strasberg Legacy
Source: The Political Economy Of Growth (1957), Chapter Four, Standstill and Movement Under Monopoly Capitalism, II, p. 119
"Fresh Water, Salt Water, and other Macroeconomic Elixirs", 1989
Part II. The Classical Style. 1. The Coherence of the Musical Language
Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven (Expanded edition, 1997)

"Summary of Principles" 2.7
Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793)
Variant: Government was intended to suppress injustice, but it offers new occasions and temptations for the commission of it.
Gallery Notes, Allbright-Knox Art Gallery, Vol. 24 summer 1961 pp. 9-14; as quoted in Abstract Expressionism Creators and Critics, edited by Clifford Ross, Abrams Publishers New York 1990, p. 197
1960s

"The Mustard magazine interview" (January 2005)
Context: Life isn’t divided into genres. It’s a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if you're lucky.

in
Context: If one was sometimes led astray by trying to simplify the elements of a science, it is because one has established systems before putting together a fairly large number of facts. Some assumption, which would be very simple when one considers only a class of phenomena, requires many other assumptions if one wants to leave the narrow circle in which we had initially withdrawn. If nature has offered to produce the maximum effect with minimum causes, it is in all of its laws that it had to solve this major problem. It is without doubt difficult to discover the foundations of this wonderful economy, i. e. the simplest causes of phenomena considered from such a wide point of view. But if this general principle of the philosophy of physics does not lead immediately to the knowledge of truth, it can direct the efforts of the human spirit, by leading it away from theories which relate the phenomena to too many different causes, and by adopting preferably those based on the smallest number of assumptions, which show to be more fruitful in consequences.