Artistic accounts involve severe abbreviations of what reality will force upon us.
ALAIN DE BOTTONArtistic accounts involve severe abbreviations of what reality will force upon us.
ALAIN DE BOTTONThere is a longing for a return to a time without the need for choices, free of the regret at the inevitable loss that all choice (however wonderful) has entailed.
ALAIN DE BOTTONAs adults, we try to develop the character traits that would have rescued our parents.
ALAIN DE BOTTONWe read the weird tales in newspapers to crowd out the even weirder stuff inside us.
ALAIN DE BOTTONThe difference between hope and despair is a different way of telling stories from the same facts.
ALAIN DE BOTTONArguments are like eels: however logical, they may slip from the minds weak grasp unless fixed there by imagery and style.
ALAIN DE BOTTONWe need a home in the psychological sense as much as we need one in the physical: to compensate for a vulnerability.
ALAIN DE BOTTONThe 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.
ALAIN DE BOTTONIt wasn’t only fanatics and drunkards who began conversations with strangers in public.
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 BOTTONThe dream of the news is that it makes us care about other people and situations. But we cannot identify with people to whom we haven’t been introduced. Humans will only respond to art, to people who are skilled in making you care.
ALAIN DE BOTTONSocial media has lots of benefits, but compared to Christianity, it tends to group people by interests. Religion puts you with people who have nothing in common except that you’re human.
ALAIN DE BOTTONThe finest proof of our loyalty toward one another was our monstrous disloyalties towards everyone else.
ALAIN DE BOTTONA virtuous, ordinary life, striving for wisdom but never far from folly, is achievement enough.
ALAIN DE BOTTONBecause it’s bad enough not getting what you want, but it’s even worse to have an idea of what it is you want and find out at the end of the journey that it isn’t, in fact, what you wanted all along.
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 BOTTON