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Description edit
To some degree, what the reader takes way from Alain de Botton's The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work will be influenced by what that particular reader brings to it. If you are looking for a serious and exhaustive analysis of work and how it affects both our psychological equilibrium and... read more
Ridiculously Simplified Synopsis edit
Quotes edit
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“...a quote from a speech by Theodore Roosevelt, in which the president spoke of the need for every man to strive for excellence and, 'if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat'”
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“Death is hard to keep in mind when there is work to be done: it seems not so much taboo as unlikely. Work does not by its nature permit us to do anything other than take it too seriously. It must destroy our sense of perspective, and we should be grateful to it for precisely that reason,...”
- Popular Highlights from Kindle Customers
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When does a job feel meaningful? Whenever it allows us to generate delight or reduce suffering in others.
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It seems easier to respond to our enthusiasms by trading in facts than by investigating the more naive question of how and why we have been moved.
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Office civilisation could not be feasible without the hard take-offs and landings effected by coffee and alcohol.
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In denying the natural place reserved for longing and error in the human lot, the bourgeois ideology denies us the possibility of collective consolation for our fractious marriages and our unexploited ambitions, and condemns us instead to solitary feelings of shame and persecution for having stubbornly failed to become who we are.
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Symons preferred a quote from Motivation and Personality, by the psychologist Abraham Maslow, which he had pinned up above the toilet: ‘It isn’t normal to know what we want. It is a rare and difficult psychological achievement’.
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Our work will at least have distracted us, it will have provided a perfect bubble in which to invest our hopes for perfection, it will have focused our immeasurable anxieties on a few relatively small-scale and achievable goals, it will have given us a sense of mastery, it will have made us respectably tired, it will have put food on the table. It will have kept us out of greater trouble.
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In a perfect society, so specialised would all jobs be, that no one would any longer understand what anyone else was doing.
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We might define art as anything which pushes our thoughts in important yet neglected directions.
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The alcohol-inspired fights that break out in market towns on Saturday evenings are predictable symptoms of fury at our incarceration. They are a reminder of the price we pay for our daily submission at the altars of prudence and order – and of the rage that silently accumulates beneath a uniquely law-abiding and compliant surface.
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Most of us stand poised at the edge of brilliance, haunted by the knowledge of our proximity, yet still demonstrably on the wrong side of the line, our dealings with reality undermined by a range of minor yet critical psychological flaws (a little too much optimism, an unprocessed rebelliousness, a fatal impatience or sentimentality). We are like an exquisite high-speed aircraft which for lack of a tiny part is left stranded beside the runway, rendered slower than a tractor or a bicycle.
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Authors & Contributors edit
- Alain de Botton (Author)
First Edition edit
Original Language: English
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Page Count: 336
Publisher: Add the publisher.
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Publication Date: Add the publication date.
ISBN: Add the ISBN.
Page Count: 336
Classification edit
- Library of Congress: Add the Library of Congress Classification.
- Dewey: 306.36
Subjects edit
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