# Quote — Alain de Botton, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work

> In reality, the likelihood of reaching the pinnacle of capitalist society today is only marginally better than were the chances of being accepted into the French nobility four centuries ago, though at least an aristocratic age was franker, and therefore kinder, about the odds. It did not relentlessly play up the possibilities open to all, … and so, in turn, did not cruelly equate an ordinary life with a failed one.

- Author: [Alain de Botton](https://www.leafyquotes.com/alain-de-botton.md)
- Book: [The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work](https://www.leafyquotes.com/alain-de-botton/the-pleasures-and-sorrows-of-work.md)
- Page: 278
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Alain_de_Botton#The_Pleasures_and_Sorrows_of_Work_(2009)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/alain-de-botton/the-pleasures-and-sorrows-of-work/in-reality-the

## More from this book

> To look at the paper is to raise a seashell to one’s ear and to be overwhelmed by the roar of humanity.

p. 237 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/alain-de-botton/the-pleasures-and-sorrows-of-work/to-look-at-the.md)

> Symons … remarked that the most common and unhelpful illusion plaguing those who came to see him was the idea that they ought somehow, in the normal course of events, to have intuited—long before they had finished their degrees, started families, bought houses and risen to the top of law firms—what they should properly be doing with their lives. They were tormented by a residual notion of having through some error or stupidity on their part missed out on their true calling.

p. 113 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/alain-de-botton/the-pleasures-and-sorrows-of-work/symons-remarked-that.md)

> The pre-scientific age, whatever its deficiencies, had at least offered its members the peace of mind that follows from knowing all man-made achievements to be nothing next to the grandeur of the universe. We, more blessed in our gadgetry but less humble in our outlook, have been left … having no more compelling repository of veneration than our brilliant, precise, blinkered and morally troubling fellow human beings.

p. 168 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/alain-de-botton/the-pleasures-and-sorrows-of-work/the-pre-scientific-age.md)