We envy only those whom we feel ourselves to be like; we envy only members of our reference group. There are few successes more unendurable than thos… - Alain de Botton

Most of our childhood is stored not in photos, but in certain biscuits, lights of day, smells, textures of carpet.

The start of work means the end to freedom, but also to doubt, intensity and wayward desires. The accountant’s ten thousand possibilities have been reduced to an agreeable handful. She has a business card which she hands over in meetings and which tells other people—and, more meaningfully perhaps, reminds her—that she is a Business Unit Senior manager, rather than a vaporous transient consciousness in an incidental universe. How satisfying it is to be held in check by the assumptions of colleagues, instead of being forced to contemplate, in the loneliness of the early hours, all that one might have been and now never will be. … Life is no longer mysterious, sad, haunting, touching, confusing or melancholy; it is a practical stage for clear-eyed action.

There is a devilishly direct relationship between the significance of an idea and how nervous we become at the prospect of having to think about it.