Alain De Botton, Status Anxiety Quotes

Not being understood may be taken as a sign that there is much in one to understand.

The desire for high status is never stronger than in situations where "ordinary" life fails to answer a median need for dignity and comfort.

A world where a majority had imbibed the lessons implicit within tragic art would be one in which the consequences of our failures would necessarily cease to weigh upon us so heavily.

Anxiety is the handmaiden of contemporary ambition.

as the determinants of high status keep shifting, so, too, naturally, will the triggers of status anxiety be altered.

Art was the very antithesis of crass moralism.

The quickest way to stop noticing something, may be to buy it—just as the quickest way to stop appreciating someone may be to marry him or her.

A sharp decline in actual deprivation may, paradoxically, have been accompanied by an ongoing and even escalating sense of fear of deprivation.

Judged against eternity, how little of what agitates us makes any difference.