No equal

Ulrich stubbornly expanded on this point: “What one needs in life is merely the conviction that one’s business is doing better than one’s neighbor’s. Your pictures, my mathematics, somebody else’s wife and children—everything that can assure a person that he is in no way unusual but that in this way of being in no way unusual he will not so easily find his equal!”

—Robert Musil, The Man without Qualities, chap. 54