A snob is anybody who takes a small part of you and uses that to come to a complete vision of who you are.

De Botton reframes “snobbery” as a cognitive and moral error: the reduction of a whole person to a single, socially legible trait—accent, job title, school, clothes, taste—and then treating that fragment as destiny. The quote criticizes the way status thinking turns partial evidence into a total judgment, collapsing complexity into a stereotype. It also implies a plea for interpretive humility: any snapshot of someone’s life is incomplete, and to mistake it for the whole is to misread them. In de Botton’s broader concerns about anxiety, class, and recognition, the line suggests that dignity depends on being seen in one’s full humanity rather than through a narrow status lens.