Quote

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

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Alain de Botton
Age: 54
Born: 1969
Born: December 20
Journalist
Philosopher
Publisher
Writer
City of Zurich
Alain De Botton
Began
Landscapes
Traditional
Coincidence
Western
Sublime
Belief
Precisely
Religion
Attraction
Moment
Developed
Moments
Beliefs
Landscape
Wane

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What is fascinating about marriage is why anyone wants to get married.
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Though it may feel otherwise, enjoying life is no more dangerous than apprehending it with continuous anxiety and gloom.
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Let's say you went to Harvard or Oxford or Cambridge, and you said, 'I've come here because I'm in search of morality, guidance and consolation I want to know how to live,' - they would show you the way to the insane asylum.
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The most attractive are not those who allow us to kiss them at once [we soon feel ungrateful] or those who never allow us to kiss them [we soon forget them], but those who coyly lead us between the two extremes.
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What is a snob? A snob is anybody who takes a small part of you and uses that to come to a complete vision of who you are. That is snobbery.
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to design means forcing ourselves to unlearn what we believe we already know, patiently to take apart the mechanisms behind our reflexes and to acknowledge the mystery and stupefying complexity of everyday gestures like switching off a light of turning on a tap
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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.
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The telephone becomes an instrument of torture in the demonic hands of a beloved who doesn't call.
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Intuition is unconscious accumulated experience informing judgement in real time.
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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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Most of us still caged within careers chosen for us by our not entirely worldly 18-22 year old selves.
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Wealth is not an absolute. It is relative to desire. Every time we yearn for something we cannot afford, we grow poorer, whatever our resources. And every time we feel satisfied with what we have, we can be counted as rich, however little we may actually possess.
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Every adult life could be said to be defined by two great love stories: the story of our quest for sexual love and the story of our quest for love from the world.
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Our jobs make relentless calls on a narrow band of our faculties, reducing our chances of achieving rounded personalities and leaving us to suspect (often in the gathering darkness of a Sunday evening) that much of who we are, or could be, has gone unexplored.
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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.
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Only as we mature does affection begin to depend on achievement.
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The architects who benefit us most maybe those generous enough to lay aside their claims to genius in order to devote themselves to assembling graceful but predominantly unoriginal boxes. Architecture should have the confidence and the kindness to be a little boring.
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Good books put a finger on emotions that are deeply our own - but that we could never have described on our own.
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When Proust urges us to evaluate the world properly, he repeatedly reminds us of the value of modest scenes.
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