Alain de Botton - From the Anticipation category:
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. (Alain de Botton)
Alain de Botton - From the Beauty category:
A dominant impulse on encountering beauty is to wish to hold on to it, to possess it and give it weight in one's life. There is an urge to say, 'I was here, I saw this and it mattered to me.' (Alain de Botton)
Alain de Botton - From the Curiosity category:
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. (Alain de Botton)
Alain de Botton - From the Desire category:
What we find exotic abroad may be what we hunger for in vain at home. (Alain de Botton)
Alain de Botton - From the Drawing category:
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. (Alain de Botton)
Alain de Botton - From the Enthusiasm category:
Art cannot single-handedly create enthusiasm... it merely contributes to enthusiasm and guides us to be more conscious of feelings that we might previously have experienced only tentatively or hurriedly. (Alain de Botton)
Alain de Botton - From the Envy category:
The company of certain people may excite our generosity and sensitivity, while that of others awakens our competitiveness and envy. (Alain de Botton)
Alain de Botton - From the Expectation category:
What am I supposed to do here? What am I supposed to think? (Alain de Botton)
Alain de Botton - From the Friendship category:
Our responses to the world are crucially moulded by the company we keep, for we temper our curiosity to fit in with the expectations of others. (Alain de Botton)
Alain de Botton - From the Goodness category:
The activities of drawing, eating and drinking, all involve assimilations by the self of desirable elements from the world, a transfer of goodness from without to within. (Alain de Botton)
Alain de Botton - From the Greatness category:
There 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)
Alain de Botton - From the Happiness category:
If our lives are dominated by a search for happiness, then perhaps few activities reveal as much about the dynamics of this quest – in all its ardour and paradoxes – than our travels. (Alain de Botton)
Alain de Botton - From the Happiness category:
Unhappiness can stem from having only one perspective to play with. (Alain de Botton)
Alain de Botton - From the Imagination category:
Nothing was as I had imagined it... my thoughts of the island had circled around three immobile mental images, assembled during the reading of a brochure and an airline timetable. (Alain de Botton)
Alain de Botton - From the Interest category:
Once I began to consider everything as being of potential interest, objects released latent layers of value. (Alain de Botton)
Alain de Botton - From the Life category:
It 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. (Alain de Botton)
Alain de Botton - From the Memory category:
Memory is... similar to anticipation: an instrument of simplification and selection. (Alain de Botton)
Alain de Botton - From the Photography category:
Taking photographs can assuage the itch for possession sparked by the beauty of a place; our anxiety over losing a precious scene can decline with every click of the shutter. (Alain de Botton)
Alain de Botton - From the Photography category:
Rather 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 Botton)
Alain de Botton - From the Questions category:
The blunt large questions become connected to smaller, apparently esoteric ones. (Alain de Botton)
Alain de Botton - From the Questions category:
'How do the stems connect to the roots?' 'Where is the mist coming from?' 'Why does one tree seem darker than another?' These questions are implicitly asked and answered in the process of sketching. (Alain de Botton)
Alain de Botton - From the Realism category:
Every realistic picture represents a choice as to which features of reality should be given prominence; no painting ever captures the whole... (Alain de Botton)
Alain de Botton - From the Reality category:
Artistic accounts involve severe abbreviations of what reality will force upon us. (Alain de Botton)
Alain de Botton - From the Religion category:
It is no coincidence that the Western attraction to sublime landscapes developed at precisely the moment when traditional beliefs in God began to wane. (Alain de Botton)
Alain de Botton - From the Sadness category:
It is perhaps sad books that best console us when we are sad... (Alain de Botton)
Alain de Botton - From the Spectator category:
A successful work will draw out the features capable of exciting a sense of beauty and interest in the spectator. (Alain de Botton)
Alain de Botton - From the Standards category:
Bad art might be defined as a series of bad choices about what to show and what to leave out. (Alain de Botton)
Alain de Botton - From the Thinking category:
The mind may be reluctant to think properly when thinking is all it is supposed to do; the task can be as paralysing as having to tell a joke or mimic an accent on demand. (Alain de Botton)
Alain de Botton - From the Travel category:
A danger of travel is that we may see things at the wrong time, before we have had an opportunity to build up the necessary receptivity, so that new information is as useless and fugitive as necklace beads without a connecting chain. (Alain de Botton)
Alain de Botton - From the Universe category:
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. (Alain de Botton)
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