A Quote by Alain de Botton

According to one influential wing of modern secular society there are few more disreputable fates than to end up being 'like everyone else' for 'everyone else' is a category that comprises the mediocre and the conformist, the boring and the suburban. The goal of all right-thinking people should be to mark themselves off from the crowd and 'stand out' in whatever way their talents allow.

Alain de Botton

Quote Topics

According Allow Being Boring Category Conformist Crowd Else End Everyone Everyone Else Few Goal Influential Like Mark Mediocre Modern More Off Out People Right Secular Secular Society Should Society Stand Suburban Talents Than Themselves Thinking Up Way Whatever Wing

Quote Author

Alain de Botton
English - Writer
Born: December 20, 1969

One reason people who spend a lot of time thinking about and working on a problem or a craft seem to find breakthroughs more often than everyone else is that they've failed more often than everyone else.

Seth Godin

My theory is that I'm just closer to the sun than everyone else. I weigh more than everyone else, I'm taller than everyone else. When it's really humid and hot outside it's going to take a bigger toll on me.

John Isner

If you are going to think the same as everyone else and do the same as everyone else, you will end up being the same as everyone else. In today's competitive environment you have to think a bit differently.

Lloyd Dorfman

I do not think everyone is created equal. In fact, I know they're not. [The Constitution] means that everyone should have the same laws as everyone else. It doesn't mean that everyone's as smart or as cute or as lucky as everyone else.

Fran Lebowitz

I always tried to be different from everyone else. Then I found out about boxing. That was the way I could be different from everyone else. I always went against the crowd.

Riddick Bowe

I keep thinking I should get a phone, because everyone's got one and it becomes increasingly difficult to exist in a society where everyone else has moved ahead and you haven't.

Hugo Weaving

When you write like everyone else and sound like everyone else and act like everyone else, you're saying, 'Our products are like everyone else's, too.'

Jason Fried

At a stage when young people want more than anything to be like everyone else, they find themselves the least alike. Everyone their age is growing and changing, but each at his or her own pace.

Laurence Steinberg

Most people want everyone else in the world to change themselves. Let me tell you, it's easier to change yourself than everyone else.

Robert Kiyosaki

Well, capitalism is going to grow and grow. The nature of it is that the guy who has the most poker chips on the table has more leverage than everyone else. He can eventually outbluff everyone else and outraise everyone else at the table. That's what has happened and it needs to be corrected.

Simon Baker

For years I've wanted to live according to everyone else's morals. I've forced myself to live like everyone else, to look like everyone else. I said what was necessary to join together, even when I felt separate. And after all of this, catastrophe came. Now I wander amid the debris, I am lawless, torn to pieces, alone and accepting to be so, resigned to my singularity and to my infirmities. And I must rebuild a truth-after having lived all my life in a sort of lie.

Albert Camus

Or about how when you're a child, to stop you from following the crowd you're assaulted with the line "If everyone jumped off a bridge, would you?" but when you're an adult and to be different is suddenly a crime, people seem to be saying, "Hey. Everyone else is jumping off a bridge. Why aren't you?

Steve Toltz

People are always pleased to indulge their religiosity when it allows them to stand in judgment of someone else, licenses them to feel superior to someone else, tells them they are more righteous than someone else. They are less enthusiastic when religiosity demands that they be compassionate to someone else. That they show charity, service and mercy to everyone else.

Leonard Pitts

Social media can help or hurt you. People are more into other people's lives than their own. Everyone sees everyone else's success online, and we allow it to magnify our own failure.

Karen Civil

Six degrees of separation doesn't mean that everyone is linked to everyone else in just six steps. It means that a very small number of people are linked to everyone else in a few steps, and the rest of us are linked to the world through those special few.