43 quotes
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.
The Consolations of Philosophy (2000)
So it’s all about trying to find the best fit between your talents and what the world can offer at that point in time.
It would scarcely be acceptable, for example, to ask in the course of an ordinary conversation what our society holds to be the purpose of work.
The Consolations of Philosophy (2000)
Philosophy had supplied Socrates with convictions in which he had been able to have rational, as opposed to hysterical, confidence when faced with disapproval.
The Consolations of Philosophy (2000)
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.
The Consolations of Philosophy (2000)
The real issue is not whether baking biscuits is meaningful, but the extent to which the activity can seem to be so after it has been continuously stretched and subdivided across five thousand lives.
The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (2009)
Alcohol-inspired fights … are a reminder of the price we pay for our daily submission at the altars of prudence and order.
The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (2009)
Not everyone is worth listening to.
The Consolations of Philosophy (2000)
Socrates, on being insulted in the marketplace, asked by a passerby, “Don’t you worry about being called names?” retorted, “Why? Do you think I should resent it if an ass had kicked me?”
Status Anxiety (2004)
By travelling across frontiers, on horseback and in the imagination, Montaigne invited us to to exchange local prejudices and the self division they induced for less constraining identities as citizens of the world.
The Consolations of Philosophy (2000)
It appeared that the one area in which Sir Bob excelled was anxiety. He was marked out by his relentless ability to find fault with others’ mediocrity—suggesting that a certain kind of intelligence may at heart be nothing more or less than a superior capacity for dissatisfaction.
The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (2009)
The European bourgeoisie took the momentous steps of co-opting on behalf of both marriage and work the pleasures hitherto pessimistically—or perhaps realistically—confined, by aristocrats, to the subsidiary realms of the love affair and the hobby.
The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (2009)
Year-end financial statements … express a truth about office life which is no less irrefutable—yet also, in the end, no less irrelevant or irritating—than an evolutionary biologist’s proud reminder that the purpose of existence lies in the propagation of our genes.
The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (2009)
These inventors were elevating the formulation of entrepreneurial ideas to the status of a visionary activity. Though forced to justify their efforts in the pragmatic language of venture capital, they were at heart utopian thinkers intent on transforming the world.
The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (2009)
...rather than frankly acknowledging the troubling truth, anathema to a democratic society, that the great writer, like the contented worker, remains an erratic and anomalous event,...
Our minds are susceptible to the influence of external voices, telling us what we require to be satisfied, voices that may drown our the faint sounds emitted from our souls, and distract us from the careful, arduous task of accurately naming our priorities.
Status Anxiety (2004)
To cut out every negative root would simultaneously mean choking off positive elements that might arise from it further up the stem of the plant.
We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them.
The Consolations of Philosophy (2000)
Workers were occupied with the ancient task of trying to stay alive, which simply happened to require, in a consumer economy overwhelmingly based on the satisfaction of peripheral desires, a series of activities all to easily confused with clownishness.
The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (2009)
Someone who has thought rationally and deeply about how the body works is likely to arrive at better ideas about how to be healthy than someone who has followed a hunch. Medicine presupposes a hierarchy between the confusion the layperson will be in about what is wrong with him, and the more accurate knowledge available to doctors reasoning logically. … At the heart of Epicureanism is the thought that we are as bad at answering the question “What will make me happy?” as “What will make me healthy?” … Our souls do not spell out their troubles.
The Consolations of Philosophy (2000)
I think where people tend to end up results from a combination of encouragement, accident, and lucky break, etc. etc. Like many others, my career happened like it did because certain doors opened and certain doors closed.