A successful work will draw out the features capable of exciting a sense of beauty and interest in the spectator.
ALAIN DE BOTTONIt is not just nature that defies us. Human life is as overwhelming… If we spend time in it [the vast spaces of nature], they may help us to accept more graciously the great, unfathomable events that molest our lives and will inevitably return us to dust.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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It’s hard loving those who don’t much like themselves: “If you’re so great, why would you think I’m so great.
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It was no longer her absence that wounded me, but my growing indifference to it. Forgetting, however calming, was also a reminder of infidelity to what I had at one time held so dear.
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The blunt large questions become connected to smaller, apparently esoteric ones.
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The challenge for a human now is to be more interesting to another than his or her smartphone.
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Intuition is unconscious accumulated experience informing judgement in real time.
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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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Memory is… similar to anticipation: an instrument of simplification and selection.
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Most good thinking has its origin in fear.
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Art holds out the promise of inner wholeness.
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At the heart of every frustration lies a basic structure: the collision of a wish with an unyielding reality.
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People only get really interesting when they start to rattle the bars of their cages.
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Kant and Hegel are interesting thinkers. But I am happy to insist that they are also terrible writers.
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Most of what makes a book ‘good’ is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.
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Man seems merely dust postponed: the sublime as an encounter – pleasurable, intoxicating, even – with human weakness in the face of strength, age and size of the universe.
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The materialistic view of happiness of our age starkly revealed in our understanding of the word “luxury.
ALAIN DE BOTTON