Quotes
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It is according to how we are able to answer the question of what we do (normally the first enquiry we will have to field in any new acquaintance) that the quality of our reception is likely to be decided.
Status Anxiety
The true nature of bureaucracy may be nowhere more obvious to the observer than in a developing country, for only there will it still be made manifest by the full complement of documents, files, veneered desks and cabinets - which convey the strict and inverse relationship between productivity and paperwork.
The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work
It is surely significant that the adults who feature in children's books are rarely, if ever, Regional Sales Managers or Building Services Engineers.
The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work
Love is an incurable disease. In love, there is permanent suffering. Those who love and those who are happy are not the same.
How Proust Can Change Your Life
Our jobs make relentless calls on a narrow band of our faculties, reducing our chances of achieving rounded personalities and leaving us to suspect (often in the gathering darkness of a Sunday evening) that much of who we are, or could be, has gone unexplored.
The Architecture of Happiness
In a secularising world, art has replaced religion as a touchstone of our reverence and devotion.
Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion
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.
Status Anxiety
The desire for high status is never stronger than in situations where "ordinary" life fails to answer a median need for dignity and comfort.
Status Anxiety
Instead of bringing back 1600 plants, we might return from our journeys with a collection of small unf�ted but life-enhancing thoughts.
The Art of Travel
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On Anger: "For every minute you remain angry, you give up sixty seconds of peace of mind."
Essays
Essays
On Destiny: "Our destiny exercises its influence over us even when, as yet, we have not learned its nature: it is our future that lays down the law of our today."
Human, All Too Human
Human, All Too Human
On Friendship: "A crowd is not company; and faces are but a gallery of pictures; and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love."
Essays
Essays