“My expectations-which I extended whenever I came close to accomplishing my goals-made it impossible ever to feel satisfied with my success.”
“The walking stick serves the purpose of an advertisement that the bearer's hands are employed otherwise than in useful effort, and it therefore has utility as an evidence of leisure.”
Source: Theory of the Leisure Class
“As a matter of selective necessity, man is an agent. He is, in his own apprehension, a centre of unfolding impulsive activity-'teleological activity.' He is an agent seeking in every act the accomplishment of some concrete, objective, impersonal end. By force of being such an agent, he is possessed of a taste for effective work, and a distaste for futile effort.”
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“Beauty is commonly a gratification of our sense of costliness masquerading under the name of beauty.”
Source: BUSINESS & ECONOMICS Premium Collection: 25+ Titles in One Volume: The Theory of Business Enterprise, The Higher Learning in America, The Vested Interests and the Common Man, On the Nature of Capital…: The Theory of the Leisure Class, The Beginning of Ownership, The Preconceptions of Economic Science, The Industrial System and the Captains of Industry, The Socialist Economics of Karl Marx…
“The superior excellence imputed to the book, which imitates the products of antique and obsolete processes, is conceived to be chiefly a superior utility in the aesthetic respect; but it is not unusual to find a well-bred book-lover insisting that the clumsier product is also more serviceable as a vehicle of printed speech.”
Source: A Veblen Treasury: From Leisure Class to War, Peace, and Capitalism
“The changing styles are the expression of a restless search for something which shall commend itself to our aesthetic sense; but as each innovation is subject to the selective action of the norm of conspicuous waste, the range within which innovation can take place is somewhat restricted. The innovation must not only be more beautiful, or perhaps oftener less offensive, than that which it displaces, but it must also come up to the accepted standard of expensiveness.”
Source: A Veblen Treasury: From Leisure Class to War, Peace, and Capitalism
“These various habits of thought, or habitual expressions of life, are all phases of the single life sequence of the individual; therefore a habit formed in response to a given stimulus will necessarily affect the character of the response made to other stimuli. A modification of human nature at any one point is a modification of human nature as a whole.”
Source: BUSINESS & ECONOMICS Premium Collection: 25+ Titles in One Volume: The Theory of Business Enterprise, The Higher Learning in America, The Vested Interests and the Common Man, On the Nature of Capital…: The Theory of the Leisure Class, The Beginning of Ownership, The Preconceptions of Economic Science, The Industrial System and the Captains of Industry, The Socialist Economics of Karl Marx…
“Inherited aptitudes and traits of temperament count for quite as much as length of habituation in deciding what range of habits will come to dominate any individual's scheme of life.”
Source: A Veblen Treasury: From Leisure Class to War, Peace, and Capitalism
“The aesthetic serviceability of objects of beauty is not greatly nor universally heightened by possession.”
Source: A Veblen Treasury: From Leisure Class to War, Peace, and Capitalism
“The individual's habits of thought make an organic complex, the trend of which is necessarily in the direction of serviceability to the life process. When it is attempted to assimilate systematic waste or futility, as an end in life, into this organic complex, there presently supervenes a revulsion.”
Source: The Theory of the Leisure Class
