luni, 22 februarie 2010

Status anxiety, Alain de Botton

"But the tragedian draws us close to an almost unbearable truth: that every folly of which a human being has been guilty in the course of history can be traced back to aspects of our own nature; that we bear within ourselves the whole of the human condition, in its worst and best aspects, so that we too might be capable of anything under the right, or rather the very wrong circumstances."

"We can overcome a feeling of unimportance not by making ourselves more important but by recognizing the relative unimportance of everyone. Our concern with who is a few millimetres taller than us can give way to an awe for things 1000 million times larger than us, a force which we may be moved to call infinity, eternity - or simply, and perhaps most usefully, God."

"But there is no such thing as a stranger, a Christian would insist, there can only be an impression of strangeness born out of failure to aknowledge that others share in our own needs and weaknesses. Nothing could be more noble, or more fully human, than to perceive that we are indeed fundamentally, were it matters, just like everyone else."

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