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61 " see the factory-village and the railway, and fancy that the beauty of the landscape is broken up by these, for they are not yet consecrated in their reading. But the true poet sees them fall within the great order of nature not less than the beehive or the spider’s geometrical web. Nature adopts them very fast into her vital circles, and the gliding train of cars she loves like her own’. "
― Alain de Botton , The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work
62 " Entrepreneurship appears to be almost wholly dependent on a sense that the present order is an unreliable and cowardly indicator of the possible. The absence of certain practices and products is deemed by entrepreneurs to be neither right nor inevitable, but merely evidence of the conformity and lack of imagination of the herd. "
63 " Caracterul absolut al bilanțurilor anuale nu face decât să sublinieze în ce măsură a produce bani este, în realitate, un pretext pentru a face alte lucruri, a te da jos din pat dimineața, a vorbi cu competență dinaintea unor retroproiectoare, a băga în priză laptopuri în camere de hotel din străinătate, a susține prezentări în care se analizează cote de piață și a ofta la vederea pantalonilor din lână gri lungi până la genunchi ai lui Katie. Cu mult înainte să fi câștigat primii bani, eram conștienți de nevoia de a ne face de lucru: cunoșteam mulțumirea pe care ți-o dau stivuirea cuburilor, turnatul apei în și din recipiente și mutatul nisipului dintr-o groapă în alta, netulburați de miza măruntă a faptelor noastre. "
64 " But Symons maintained that a secularised version of this notion had survived even into the modern age, where it was prone to torture us with an expectation that the meaning of our lives might at some point be revealed to us in a ready-made and decisive form, which would in turn render us permanently immune to feelings of confusion, envy and regret. 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’. "
65 " Without envy, there could be no recognition of one’s desires. So Symons gave Carol another ten-minute slot to list everyone she most regularly envied – adding on his way out of the room that he didn’t care for niceness and that if there were not at least two names of close colleagues or friends on her piece of paper, he would know that she had been evasively sentimental. "
66 " Its particular interest for Ian, however, lay in its thesis about the history of the Dutch relationship to windmills, for it emphasized that these early industrial objects had originally been felt to have all the pylons' threateningly alien qualities, rather than the air of enchantment and playfulness now routinely associated with them. They had been denounced from pulpits and occasionally burnt to the ground by suspicious villagers. "
67 " 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. "