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Once I began to consider everything as being of potential interest, objects released latent layers of value.

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
Values
Released
Everything
Layers
Began
Potential
Consider
Objects
Value
Interest
Latent

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Artistic accounts involve severe abbreviations of what reality will force upon us.
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The degree of sympathy we feel regarding another's fiasco is directly proportional to how easy or difficult it is for us to imagine ourselves, under like circumstances, making a similar mistake.
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Arguments are like eels: however logical, they may slip from the minds weak grasp unless fixed there by imagery and style.
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The largest part of what we call 'personality' is determined by how we've opted to defend ourselves against anxiety and sadness.
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So many complaints boil down to the belly ache of the fragile, mortal, ignored ego in a vast and indifferent universe.
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The problem isn't so much finding good ideas (there is no shortage) as embedding the ones we have into everyday practice.
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A great writer picks up on those things that matter. It’s almost like their radar is attuned to the most significant moments.
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As adults, we try to develop the character traits that would have rescued our parents.
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It is not necessarily at home that we best encounter our true selves. The furniture insists that we cannot change because it does not the domestic setting keeps us tethered to the person we are in ordinary life, who may not be who we essentially are.
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You normally have to be bashed about a bit by life to see the point of daffodils, sunsets and uneventful nice days.
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The lesson? To respond to the unexpected and hurtful behavior of others with something more than a wipe of the glasses, to see it as a chance to expand our understanding.
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We wanted to test each other's capacity for survival: only if we had tried in vain to destroy one another would we know we were safe.
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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.
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Many moments in religion seem attractive to me even though I can't believe in any of it.
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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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One kind of good book should leave you asking: how did the author know that about me?
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Bad architecture is in the end as much a failure of psychology as of design. It is an example expressed through materials of the same tendencies which in other domains will lead us to marry the wrong people, choose inappropriate jobs and book unsuccessful holidays: the tendency not to understand who we are and what will satisfy us.
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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.
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When work is not going well, it's useful to remember that our identities stretch beyond what is on the business card, that we were people long before we became workers - and will continue to be human once we have put our tools down forever.
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The moment we cry in a film is not when things are sad but when they turn out to be more beautiful than we expected them to be.
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