The arrogance that says analysing the relationship between reasons and causes is more important than writing a philosophy of shyness or sadness or friendship drives me nuts. I can’t accept that.
ALAIN DE BOTTONThe arrogance that says analysing the relationship between reasons and causes is more important than writing a philosophy of shyness or sadness or friendship drives me nuts. I can’t accept that.
ALAIN DE BOTTONA ‘good job’ can be both practically attractive while still not good enough to devote your entire life to.
ALAIN DE BOTTONEvery realistic picture represents a choice as to which features of reality should be given prominence; no painting ever captures the whole.
ALAIN DE BOTTONWhen I see someone like Richard Dawkins, I see my father. I grew up with that. I’m basically the child of Richard Dawkins.
ALAIN DE BOTTONWe will cease to be angry once we cease to be so hopeful.
ALAIN DE BOTTONRather than employing it as a supplement to active, conscious seeing, they used the medium as a substitute, paying less attention to the world than they had done previously, taking it on faith that photography automatically assured them possession of it.
ALAIN DE BOTTONMost victories are, in the best way, acts of revenge.
ALAIN DE BOTTONAs we write, so we build: to keep a record of what matters to us.
ALAIN DE BOTTONBad art might be defined as a series of bad choices about what to show and what to leave out.
ALAIN DE BOTTONThe greatest works of art speak to us without knowing us.
ALAIN DE BOTTONMost of what makes a book ‘good’ is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.
ALAIN DE BOTTONWe are presented with an unpleasant choice between either committing to peculiar concepts about immaterial deities or letting go entirely of a host of consoling, subtle or just charming rituals for which we struggle to find equivalents in secular society.
ALAIN DE BOTTONWhen Proust urges us to evaluate the world properly, he repeatedly reminds us of the value of modest scenes.
ALAIN DE BOTTONAt the heart of every frustration lies a basic structure: the collision of a wish with an unyielding reality.
ALAIN DE BOTTONThere are selections so acute that they come to define a place, with the result that we can no longer travel through that landscape without being reminded of what a great artist noticed there.
ALAIN DE BOTTONEnvy: a confused, tangled guide to one’s own ambitions.
ALAIN DE BOTTON