“...the truth of the maxim that beauty lies between the extremities of order and complexity.” — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
A successful work will draw out the features capable of exciting a sense of beauty and interest in the spectator. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“It is in dialogue with pain that many beautiful things acquire their value.” — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“Analogising architecture with ethics helps us to discern that there is unlikely ever to be a single source of beauty in a… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
It would be foolish to describe the logistics hub as merely ugly, for it has the horrifying, soulless, immaculate beauty characteristic of… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
What we seek, at the deepest level, is inwardly to resemble, rather than physically to possess, the objects and places that touch… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“...Because beauty is typically the result of a few qualities working in concert, it can take more to guarantee the appeal of… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“Beauty, then, is a fragment of the divine, and the sight of it saddens us by evoking our sense of loss and… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“[...] what Ruskin judged to be the twin purposes of art: to make sense of pain and to fathom the sources of beauty.” — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“There is a danger of developing a blanket distaste for modern life which could have its attractions but lack the all-important images… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Endeavoring to purchase something we think beautiful may in fact be the most unimaginative way of dealing with the longing it excites… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“Beneath the pleasure generated by the juxtaposition of order and complexity, we can identify the subsidiary architectural virtue of balance. Beauty is… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“It follows that the balance we approve of in architecture, and which we anoint with the word 'beautiful', alludes to a state… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Our capacity to draw happiness from aesthetic objects or material goods in fact seems critically dependent on our first satisfying a more… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“We can conclude from this that we are drawn to call something beautiful whenever we detect that it contains in a concentrated… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“The incident emphasizes once more that beauty is something to be found, rather than passively encountered, that it requires us to pick… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“I took pride in finding Chloe more beautiful than a Platonist would have done. The most interesting faces generally oscillate between charm… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“[Donald] Keene observed [in a book entitled The Pleasures of Japanese Literature, 1988] that the Japanese sense of beauty has long sharply… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“While a common reaction to seeing a thing of beauty is to want to buy it, our real desire may be not… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
A lump rises in our throat at the sight of beauty from an implicit knowledge that the happiness it hints at is… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
A dominant impulse on encountering beauty is to wish to hold on to it, to possess it and give it weight in… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“A feeling of beauty is a sign that we have come upon a material articulation of certain of our ideas of a… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
It is perhaps when our lives are at their most problematic that we are likely to be most receptive to beautiful things. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“To be mature is, we're told, to move beyond possessiveness. Jealousy is for babies. The mature person knows that no one owns anyone.” — Alain de Botton Copy Share
“He feared that by leaving her he would ruin her life - so he stayed, and did just that.” — Alain de Botton Copy Share
You have to be quite heavily invested in someone to do them the honour of telling them you're annoyed with them. — Alain de Botton Copy Share
“The Anxiety of Sunday afternoon: your unlived lives and infinite possibility pressing upon the constraints of reality.” — Alain de Botton Copy Share
Those who divorce aren't necessarily the most unhappy, just those neatly able to believe their misery is caused by one other person. — Alain de Botton Copy Share
“We could not be fulfilled if we weren't inauthentic some of the time—inauthentic, that is, in relation to such things as our passing desires… — Alain de Botton Copy Share
“Insofar as we appreciate order, it is when we perceive it as being accompanied by complexity, when we feel that a variety of elements… — Alain de Botton Copy Share
I like the values associated with a medical family - common sense, being practical but also thoughtful. — Alain de Botton Copy Share
“Anyone who urgently needs us deserves, in the true book of love, to be our friend.” — Alain de Botton Copy Share
“We can then recognize that we invented religions to serve two central needs which continue to this day and which secular society has not… — Alain de Botton Copy Share
“Half the ingratitude and complacency in the world down to how slowly and imperceptibly most good and bad things unfold.” — Alain de Botton Copy Share
It is perhaps when our lives are at their most problematic that we are likely to be most receptive to beautiful things. — Alain de Botton Copy Share
“Does what is praised becomes better? Does an emerald become worse if it isn't praised? And what a gold, ivory, a flower or a… — Alain de Botton Copy Share
The bourgeois thinkers of the eighteenth century thus turned Aristotle's formula on its head: satisfactions which the Greek philosopher had identified with leisure were… — Alain de Botton Copy Share
Reputation matters so much only because people so seldom think for themselves. — Alain de Botton Copy Share
![“[...] what Ruskin judged to be the twin purposes of art: to make sense of pain and to fathom the sources of beauty.” quote by Alain de Botton](https://sms4smile.com/q/img-quotes/4f4/alain-de-botton-221_art_what-ruskin-judged-to-be-the-twin-purpos_944356.jpg)
![“[Donald] Keene observed [in a book entitled The Pleasures of Japanese Literature, 1988] that the Japanese sense of beauty has long sharply differed from its Western counterpart: it has been dominated by a love of irregularity rather than symmetry, the impermanent rather than the eternal and the…” quote by Alain de Botton](https://sms4smile.com/q/img-quotes/317/alain-de-botton-221_beauty_donald-keene-observed-in-a-book-entitled_2150315.jpg)
