Quote

Bad art might be defined as a series of bad choices about what to show and what to leave out.

Alain de Botton

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Alain de Botton
Age: 55
Born: 1969
Born: December 20
Journalist
Philosopher
Publisher
Writer
City of Zurich
Alain De Botton
Standards
Leave
Choices
Show
Art
Shows
Might
Defined
Series

More quotes by Alain de Botton

Image
What am I supposed to do here? What am I supposed to think?
Alain de Botton
Image
The greatest difficulty of Travel is that one is forced to take oneself along.
Alain de Botton
Image
Most anger stems from feelings of weakness, sadness and fear: hard to remember when one is at the receiving end of its defiant roar.
Alain de Botton
Image
Distress at losing an object can be as much a frustration at the intellectual mystery of the disappearance as about the loss itself.
Alain de Botton
Image
The only way to be happy is to realise how much depends on how you look at things
Alain de Botton
Image
Forcing people to eat together is an effective way to promote tolerance.
Alain de Botton
Image
All tours are filled with humiliation. My publisher once hired a private jet to fly me to a venue where 1,000 people were waiting. It almost bankrupted him.
Alain de Botton
Image
The media insists on taking what someone didn't mean to say as being far closer to the truth than what they did.
Alain de Botton
Image
It is perhaps sad books that best console us when we are sad.
Alain de Botton
Image
Our minds are susceptible to the influence of external voices telling us what we require to be satisfied, voices that may drown out the faint sounds emitted by our souls and distract us from the careful, arduous task of accurately naming our priorities.
Alain de Botton
Image
It is in books, poems, paintings which often give us the confidence to take seriously feelings in ourselves that we might otherwise never have thought to acknowledge.
Alain de Botton
Image
I went to church and couldn't swallow it. The music was nice but I don't belong there.
Alain de Botton
Image
The challenge for a human now is to be more interesting to another than his or her smartphone.
Alain de Botton
Image
Our disrespect for thinking: someone sitting in a chair, gazing out of a window blankly, always described as 'doing nothing'.
Alain de Botton
Image
Only by declaring a book completely finished can one start to see how much remains to be done on it.
Alain de Botton
Image
In a secularising world, art has replaced religion as a touchstone of our reverence and devotion.
Alain de Botton
Image
Choosing a spouse and a choosing career: the two great decisions for which society refuses to set up institutional guidance.
Alain de Botton
Image
What kills us isn't one big thing, but thousands of tiny obligations we can't turn down for fear of disappointing others.
Alain de Botton
Image
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
Image
Never, ever become a writer. It's a nightmare.
Alain de Botton