Notes & Highlights for Status Anxiety by Alain de Botton

To the injury of poverty, a meritocratic system now added the insult of shame.

Not being understood may be taken as a sign that there is much in one to understand. It is because of his massive wings that the poet cannot walk.

“Would a musician feel flattered by the loud applause of his audience if it were known to him that, with the exception of one or two, it consisted entirely of deaf people?”

Tolstoy sums up the judge’s life in a single sentence: “The pleasures Ivan Ilyich derived from his work were those of pride; the pleasures he derived from society were those of vanity; but it was genuine pleasure that he derived from playing whist.”

We must live with our enemies as if they might one day become our friends, and live with our friends as if they might sometime or other become our enemies. LA BRUYÈRE

“With no attempt there can be no failure; with no failure no humiliation. So our self-esteem in this world depends entirely on what we back ourselves to be and do. It is determined by the ratio of our actualities to our supposed potentialities.

Other people’s heads are too wretched a place for true happiness to have its seat. SCHOPENHAUER, PARERGA AND PARALIPOMENA(1851)

We are not always humiliated by failing at things, he suggested; we are humiliated only if we invest our pride and sense of worth in a given aspiration or achievement and then are disappointed in our pursuit of it.

There were moments after long suffering when what he wanted most of all (shameful as it might be for him to admit) was to be pitied like a sick child. He wanted to be caressed, kissed, cried over, as sick children are caressed and comforted. He knew that he was an important functionary with a greying beard, and so this was impossible; yet all the s... See more