Status Anxiety Quotes
"One's position in society refers to one’s value and importance in the eyes of the world."
"The consequences of high status include resources, freedom, space, comfort, time, and a sense of being valued."
"Status anxiety is a worry that we are in danger of failing to conform to the ideals of success laid down by our society."
"If our position on the ladder is a concern, it is because our self-conception is so dependent upon what others make of us."
"High status is thought by many to be one of the finest of earthly goods."
"Every adult life is defined by two great love stories: the quest for sexual love, and the quest for love from the world."
"To be observed, to be attended to, to be taken notice of with sympathy are all the advantages which we can propose to derive from bettering our condition."
"The rich man glories in his riches because he feels that they naturally draw upon him the attention of the world."
"To feel that we are taken no notice of necessarily disappoints the most ardent desires of human nature."
"The poor man goes out and comes in unheeded, and when in the midst of a crowd is in the same obscurity as if shut up in his own hovel."
"The man of rank and distinction, on the contrary, is observed by all the world."
"We rely on signs of respect from the world to feel tolerable to ourselves."
"Status is hard to achieve and even harder to maintain over a lifetime."
"From failure will flow humiliation: a corroding awareness that we have been unable to convince the world of our value."
"That status anxiety possesses an exceptional capacity to inspire sorrow."
"The hunger for status, like all appetites, can have its uses: spurring us to do justice to our talents."
"Every time we yearn for something we cannot afford, we grow poorer, whatever our resources."
"We are anxious about the place we occupy in the world because it determines how much love we are offered."
"Our sense of identity is held captive by the judgements of those we live among."
"Neglect highlights our latent negative self-assessments, while a smile or compliment as rapidly brings out the converse."
"The great fish and his brethren, far from devouring the lesser fish, in practice helped them by spending money and ensuring them of employment."
"Low status came to seem not merely regrettable but also deserved."
"We may be happy enough with little if little is what we have come to expect."
"The poor were not better because they were intrinsically better; they were more potent, their seed was stronger, their minds were cannier."
"In a meritocratic age, an element of justice appeared to enter into the distribution of poverty no less than that of wealth."
"The company of the snobbish has the power to enrage and unnerve because we sense how little of who we are deep down—that is, how little of who we are outside of our status—will be able to govern their behaviour towards us."
"This conditional attention pains us because our earliest memory of love is of being cared for in a naked, impoverished condition."
"Only as we mature does affection begin to depend on achievement: being polite, succeeding at school and later, acquiring rank and prestige."
"It is evidence of this craving that only the most inept flatterer would admit to a wish to base a friendship around an attraction to power or fame."
"Ye t, despite their efforts, the prey are liable to detect the fickleness beneath the polished surface and leave the company of snobs fearing the irrelevance of their essential selves beside any status which, for a time, they may hold precariously in their hands."
"Given their exclusive interest in reputation and achievement, snobs are prone to make some sudden tragi-comic reassessments of who their closest friends might be when the outer circumstances of their acquaintances alter."
"The problem is compounded by newspapers. Because snobs combine a weak capacity for independent judgement with an appetite for the views of influential people, their beliefs will, to a critical degree, be set by the atmosphere of the press."
"It is perhaps only ever fear that is to blame. Belittling others is no pastime for those convinced of their own standing. There is terror behind haughtiness."
"It is alarming enough to have to rely for one’s status on contingent elements. It is harder yet to live in a world so enamoured with notions of rational control that it has largely dismissed 'bad luck' as a credible explanation for defeat."
"While these imperatives may for long periods coincide without apparent friction, all but the most deluded of wage-dependent workers knows for a certainty that whenever a company is faced with making a serious choice between the two, it is the economic imperative that will always, by the very logic of the commercial system, win out."
"Art was the very antithesis of crass moralism."
"The grave's a fine and private place, but none, I think, do there embrace."
"There is no antidote against the opium of time."
"Who knows the fate of his bones, or how often he is to be buried?"
"The ruling ideas of every age are always the ideas of the ruling class."
"The grave gainsays the smooth-complexioned flattery."
"Ruins reprove us for our folly in sacrificing peace of mind for the unstable rewards of earthly power."
"What does it matter, really, if we have not succeeded in the eyes of others?"
"Everything is, in any event, fated to disappear."
"Judged against eternity, how little of what agitates us makes any difference."
"We may enjoy local victories, but ultimately all will slop back into a primeval soup."
"The greater part of our anxieties stems from an exaggerated sense of the importance of our own projects."
"To consider our petty status worries from the perspective of a thousand years hence is to be granted a rare, tranquillising glimpse of our own insignificance."
"Vast landscapes... are the representatives of infinite space, as ruins are the representatives of infinite time."
"We may best overcome a feeling of unimportance not by making ourselves more important but by recognising the relative lack of importance of everyone on earth."
"A mature solution to status anxiety may be said to begin with the recognition that status is available from, and awarded by, a variety of different audiences."
"Status anxiety is the price we pay for acknowledging that there is a public distinction between a successful and an unsuccessful life."
"Bohemia has staked out and defined a subculture in which values that have been consistently underrated or overlooked by the bourgeois mainstream may finally be granted their due authority and prestige."