Quote

It is in dialogue with pain that many beautiful things acquire their value. Acquaintance with grief turns out to be one of the more unusual prerequisites of architectural appreciation. We might, quite aside from all other requirements, need to be a little sad before buildings can properly touch us.

Alain de Botton

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Alain de Botton
Age: 55
Born: 1969
Born: December 20
Journalist
Philosopher
Publisher
Writer
City of Zurich
Alain De Botton
Many
Turns
Acquire
Architectural
Needs
Values
Appreciation
Prerequisites
Things
Pain
Dialogue
Acquaintance
Beautiful
Grief
Buildings
Littles
Touch
Requirements
Little
Value
Aside
Might
Building
Properly
Need
Quite
Unusual

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Every realistic picture represents a choice as to which features of reality should be given prominence no painting ever captures the whole.
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Our bodies hold our minds hostage to their whims and rhythms.
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Perhaps it is true that we do not really exist until there is someone there to see us existing, we cannot properly speak until there is someone who can understand what we are saying in essence, we are not wholly alive until we are loved.
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It is perhaps sad books that best console us when we are sad.
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Those who divorce aren't necessarily the most unhappy, just those neatly able to believe their misery is caused by one other person.
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Socrates, on being insulted in the marketplace, asked by a passerby, Don't you worry about being called names? retorted, Why? Do you think I should resent it if an ass had kicked me?
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I know a lot about writing, but I don't know much about how other industries work. I've tried to use my naivety to my advantage.
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Insomnia is a glamorous term for thoughts you forgot to have in the day.
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The universe is large and we are tiny, without the need for further religious superstructure. One can have so-called spiritual moments without belief in the spirit.
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The blunt large questions become connected to smaller, apparently esoteric ones.
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He did not mean to depress us, rather to free us from expectations which inspire bitterness. It is consoling, when love has let us down, to hear that happiness was never part of the plan.
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If it is true that love is the pursuit in another of qualities we lack in ourselves, then in our love of someone from another culture, one ambition may be to weld ourselves more closely to values missing from our own culture.
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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.
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There is psychological pleasure in this takeoff, too, for the swiftness of the plane’s ascent is an exemplary symbol of transformation. The display of power can inspire us to imagine analogous, decisive shifts in our own lives, to imagine that we, too, might one day surge above much that now looms over us.” P. 38-39
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One kind of good book should leave you asking: how did the author know that about me?
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