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Being incomprehensible offers unparalleled protection against having nothing to say...but writing with simplicity requires courage, for there is a danger that one will be overlooked, dismissed as simpleminded by those with a tenacious belief that the impassable prose is a hallmark of intelligence.

Alain de Botton

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Alain de Botton
Age: 54
Born: 1969
Born: December 20
Journalist
Philosopher
Publisher
Writer
City of Zurich
Alain De Botton
Courage
Overlooked
Belief
Prose
Simpleminded
Nothing
Simplicity
Impassable
Writing
Protection
Unparalleled
Requires
Dismissed
Intelligence
Tenacious
Offers
Incomprehensible
Danger
Hallmark

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The blunt large questions become connected to smaller, apparently esoteric ones.
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Work is most fulfilling when you're at the comfortable, exciting edge of not quite knowing what you are doing.
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As we write, so we build: to keep a record of what matters to us.
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The real issue is not whether baking biscuits is meaningful, but the extent to which the activity can seem to be so after it has been continuously stretched and subdivided across five thousand lives.
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Forgiveness requires a sense that bad behaviour is a sign of suffering rather than malice.
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Writing isn’t a career choice. It’s self-medication that over time precipitates the madness it was meant to ward off.
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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.
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We feel something, and reach out for the nearest phrase or hum with which to communicate, but which fails to do justice to what has induced us to do so....We stay on the outside of our impressions, as if staring at them through a frosted window, superficially related to them, yet estranged from whatever has eluded casual definition.
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It wasn't only fanatics and drunkards who began conversations with strangers in public.
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The desire for high status is never stronger than in situations where ordinary life fails to answer a median need for dignity and comfort.
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One of the unexpectedly important things that art can do for us is to teach us how to suffer more successfully.
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You need a long hard day's work to reveal the logic of the craving for very bad tv and alcohol.
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It is perhaps when our lives are at their most problematic that we are likely to be most receptive to beautiful things.
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Work finally begins when the fear of doing nothing exceeds the fear of doing it badly.
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I am in general a very pessimistic person with an optimistic, day to day take on things. The bare facts of life are utterly terrifying. And yet, one can laugh. Indeed, one has to laugh precisely because of the darkness: the nervous laughter of the trenches.
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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.
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Most of our childhood is stored not in photos, but in certain biscuits, lights of day, smells, textures of carpet.
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Sublime places repeat in grand terms a lesson that ordinary life typically teaches viciously: that the universe is mightier than we are, that we are frail and temporary and have no alternative but to accept limitations on our will that we must bow to necessities greater than ourselves.
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In a secularising world, art has replaced religion as a touchstone of our reverence and devotion.
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Must being in love always mean being in pain?
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