A Quote by Alain de Botton

What annoys me about most self-help books is that they have no tragic sense. They have no sense that life is fundamentally incomplete rather than accidentally incomplete. — © Alain de Botton
What annoys me about most self-help books is that they have no tragic sense. They have no sense that life is fundamentally incomplete rather than accidentally incomplete.
The quest of the truth had been born in me - the most tragic and incomplete, as well as the most essential, of man's quests.
Science is absolutely incomplete unless and until the scientists are Realised Souls. Medicine is incomplete, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, everything is incomplete unless and until you know the Divine laws.
perhaps there is something more than courtesy behind the dissembling reticence of childhood. ... Most artists dislike having their incomplete work considered and discussed and this analogy, I think, is valid. The child is incomplete, too, and is constantly experimenting as he seeks his own style of thought and feeling.
Remember one very fundamental thing about life: Any experience that has not been lived will hang around you, will persist: "Finish me! Live me! Complete me!" There is an intrinsic quality in every experience that it tends and wants to be finished, completed. Once completed, it evaporates; incomplete, it persists, it tortures you, it haunts you, it attracts your attention. It says, "What are you going to do about me? I am still incomplete - fulfill me!"
Jane Austin was a complete and most sensible lady, but a very incomplete and rather insensible (not senseless) woman. If this is heresy, I cannot help it.
When each thought absorbs your attention completely, it means you identify with the voice in your head. Thought then becomes invested with a sense of self. This is the ego, a mind-made "me." That mentally constructed self feels incomplete and precarious. That's why fearing and wanting are its predominant emotions and motivating forces.
I have a lot of incomplete short films and incomplete scripts out there.
Each and every incomplete thing in your life or work exerts a draining force on you, sucking the energy of accomplishment and success out of you as surely as a vampire stealing your blood. Every incomplete promise, commitment and agreement saps your strength, because it blocks your momentum, inhibits your ability to move forward, to progress and improve. Incomplete things keep calling you back to the past to take care of them.
I read recently that the problem with stereotypes isn't that they are inaccurate, but that they're incomplete. And this captures perfectly what I think about contemporary African literature. The problem isn't that it's inaccurate, it's that it's incomplete.
Being a Barrymore didn't help me, other than giving me a great sense of pride and a strange spiritual sense that I felt OK about having the passion to act. It made sense because my whole family had done it and it helped rationalise it for me.
Perhaps the most important vision of all is develop a sense of self, a sense of your own destiny, a sense of unique mission and role in life.
I felt incomplete. I was always happy but I felt incomplete and that I needed to be pushing through.
Education to independence demands that young people should be accustomed early to consult their own sense of propriety and their own reason. To regard study as mere receptivity and memory work is to have a most incomplete view of what instruction means.
The words graphic designer, architect, or industrial designer stick in my throat, giving me a sense of limitation, of specialisation within the specialty, of a relationship to society and form itself that is unsatisfactory and incomplete. This inadequate set of terms to describe an active life reveals only partially the still undefined nature of the designer.
As a young adult, I began to read widely in history, philosophy, and religion - including the Bible. I began to feel that a purely secular view of life was incomplete and that the universe was a fundamentally spiritual place.
Each of us is incomplete compared to someone else - an animal's incomplete compared to a person... and a person compared to God, who is complete only to be imaginary.
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