- WIST is my personal collection of quotations, curated for thought, amusement, turn of phrase, historical significance, or sometimes just (often-unintentional) irony.
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Popular Quotables
- “Wealth and Poverty,” speech, National… (7,639)
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- “The Triumph of Stupidity” (10 May 1933) (5,046)
- Nobel prize acceptance speech (10 Dec 1962) (4,879)
- “On The Conduct of Life” (1822) (4,101)
- “In Search of a Majority,” Speech,… (3,913)
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Adams, John • Bacon, Francis • Bible • Bierce, Ambrose • Billings, Josh • Butcher, Jim • Chesterton, Gilbert Keith • Churchill, Winston • Einstein, Albert • Eisenhower, Dwight David • Emerson, Ralph Waldo • Franklin, Benjamin • Fuller, Thomas (1654) • Gaiman, Neil • Galbraith, John Kenneth • Gandhi, Mohandas • Goethe, Johann von • Hazlitt, William • Heinlein, Robert A. • Hoffer, Eric • Huxley, Aldous • Ingersoll, Robert Green • James, William • Jefferson, Thomas • Johnson, Lyndon • Johnson, Samuel • Kennedy, John F. • King, Martin Luther • La Rochefoucauld, Francois • Lewis, C.S. • Lincoln, Abraham • Mencken, H.L. • Orwell, George • Pratchett, Terry • Roosevelt, Eleanor • Roosevelt, Theodore • Russell, Bertrand • Seneca the Younger • Shakespeare, William • Shaw, George Bernard • Stevenson, Adlai • Stevenson, Robert Louis • Twain, Mark • Watterson, Bill • Wilde, Oscar- Only the 45 most quoted authors are shown above. Full author list.
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- 9-Nov-20 - "On Education," Address on installation as rector, University of St Andrews, Scotland (1 Feb 1867) | WIST on Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (1967).
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Quotations about frustration
Note that not all quotations have been tagged, so the Search function may find additional quotations on this topic.
It is not a threat but a fact of history that if an oppressed people’s pent-up emotions are not nonviolently released, they will be violently released. So let the Negro march. Let him make pilgrimages to city hall. Let him go on freedom rides. And above all, make an effort to understand why he must do this. For if his frustration and despair are allowed to continue piling up, millions of Negroes will seek solace and security in black-nationalist ideologies. And this, inevitably, would lead to a frightening racial nightmare.
Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968) American clergyman, civil rights leader, orator
Playboy interview (Jan 1965)
(Source)
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.
Alain de Botton (b. 1969) Swiss-British author
The Consolations of Philosophy, ch. 3 “Consolation for Frustration” (2000)
(Source)
To have a discussion coolly waived when you feel that justice is all on your side is even more exasperating in marriage than in philosophy.
George Eliot (1819-1880) English novelist [pseud. of Mary Ann Evans]
Middlemarch, Book 3, ch. 24 (1871)
(Source)
Though the terrain of frustration may be vast — from a stubbed toe to an untimely death — at the heart of every frustration lies a basic structure: the collision of a wish with an unyielding reality.
Alain de Botton (b. 1969) Swiss-British author
The Consolations of Philosophy, ch. 3 “Consolation For Frustration” (2000)
Even the best cooks were saucepan throwers when the soufflé collapsed.
Absence from whom we love is worse than death,
And frustrate hope severer than despair.
William Cowper (1731-1800) English poet
“Hope, like the short-lived ray that gleams awhile”
(Source)
I’ve learned that you can tell a lot about a man by the way he handles these three things: a rainy holiday, lost luggage, and tangled Christmas tree lights.
H. Jackson "Jack" Brown, Jr. (b. 1940) American writer
Live and Learn and Pass It On (1991)
Attributed by Brown to a 52-year old person. Often misattributed (with the phrase "rainy day") to Maya Angelou. For more see here.
There is, indeed, no wild beast more to be dreaded than a communicative man having nothing to communicate.
Christian Nestell Bovee (1820-1904) American epigrammist
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought, Vol. 1 (1862)
We live in an age of Wrath. It is to be found in the terrorist, the kidnapper, the hijacker, the looter, and in the clenched fist of the demonstrator. […] When we ask what is their justification, they hardly have to give an answer, because our age finds it for them. They are angry. That is apparently enough. We justify their Wrath, so we justify their violence. If someone thinks that he has cause to be angry, he may act from his Anger as destructively as he sees fit. In fact, we have come close to the point of giving to Wrath an incontestable license to terrorize our society, just as an angry man may terrorize his family, but whereas we do not excuse the husband or the father, we extend our sympathy and understanding to the terrorist.
Henry Fairlie (1924-1990) British journalist and social critic
The Seven Deadly Sins Today (1978)
DILBERT: Lately, the only think keeping me from being a serial killer is my distaste for manual labor.
Scott Adams (b. 1957) American cartoonist
Dilbert (11 Jan. 2001)
It infuriates me to be wrong when I know I’m right.
Molière (1622-1673) French playwright, actor [stage name for Jean-Baptiste Poquelin]
(Attributed)
