Literature is the greatest reality simulator – a machine that puts you through infinitely more situations than you can ever directly witness.
ALAIN DE BOTTON
If we are inclined to forget how much there is in the world besides that which we anticipate, then works of art are perhaps a little to blame, for in them we find at work the same process of simplification or selection as in the imagination.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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Literature is the greatest reality simulator – a machine that puts you through infinitely more situations than you can ever directly witness.
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Curiosity might be pictured as being made up of chains of small questions extending outwards, sometimes over huge distances, from a central hub composed of a few blunt, large questions.
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People only get really interesting when they start to rattle the bars of their cages.
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Only as we mature does affection begin to depend on achievement.
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There’s a whole category of people who miss out by not allowing themselves to be weird enough.
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The very act of drawing an object, however badly, swiftly takes the drawer from a woolly sense of what the object looks like to a precise awareness of its component parts and particularities.
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It is by finding out what something is not that one comes closest to understanding what it is.
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It looks like it’s wasting time, but literature is actually the ultimate time-saver – because it gives us access to a range of emotions and events that it would take you years, decades, millennia to try to experience directly.
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If we are inclined to forget how much there is in the world besides that which we anticipate, then works of art are perhaps a little to blame, for in them we find at work the same process of simplification or selection as in the imagination.
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Our sadness won’t be of the searing kind but more like a blend of joy and melancholy: joy at the perfection we see before us, melancholy at an awareness of how seldom we are sufficiently blessed to encounter anything of its kind.
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We read the weird tales in newspapers to crowd out the even weirder stuff inside us.
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Our disrespect for thinking: someone sitting in a chair, gazing out of a window blankly, always described as ‘doing nothing’.
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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 bicycle.
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The problem isn’t so much finding good ideas (there is no shortage) as embedding the ones we have into everyday practice.
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One kind of good book should leave you asking: how did the author know that about me?
ALAIN DE BOTTON