For the rest of history, for most of us, our bright promise will always fall short of being actualised; it will never earn us bountiful sums of money or beget exemplary objects or organisations.. Most of us stand poised at the edge of brilliance, haunted by the knowledge of our proximity, yet still demonstrably on the wrong side of the line, our dealings with reality undermined by a range of minor yet critical psychological flaws (a little too much optimism, an unprocessed rebelliousness, a fatal impatience or sentimentality). We are like an exquisite high-speed aircraft which for lack of a tiny part is left stranded beside the runway, rendered slower than a tractor or a bicycle. Alain De Botton
About This Quote

Ralph Waldo Emerson was an American essayist, poet, and lecturer. He served as a president of Harvard University and was an early advocate of the human potential movement. He is best known for his collection of essays Self-Reliance (1841), which was the first major collection of essays in the United States.

Source: The Pleasures And Sorrows Of Work

Some Similar Quotes
  1. Stop fighting me! " he said, trying to pull on the arm he held. He was in a precarious position himself, straddling the rail as he tried to lean over far enough to get me and actually hold onto me.“ Let go of me! ”... - Richelle Mead
  2. I'm gonna fight for you, until your heart stops beating. - Stephenie Meyer
  3. It's not that I can't live without you; it's that I don't want to. There's a difference. We all make choices in life and I choose you. My heart belongs to you. And I'm not asking for it back, even if you won't want it... - J. Sterling
  4. A mother gives you a life, a mother-in-law gives you her life. - Amit Kalantri
  5. Those who don't value their words, will never value your wishes. - Amit Kalantri
More Quotes By Alain De Botton
  1. One rarely falls in love without being as much attracted to what is interestingly wrong with someone as what is objectively healthy.
  2. There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life.
  3. There's a whole category of people who miss out by not allowing themselves to be weird enough.
  4. 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.
  5. The price we have paid for expecting to be so much more than our ancestors is a perpetual anxiety that we are far from being all we might be.
Related Topics