In a secularising world, art has replaced religion as a touchstone of our reverence and devotion. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“If we are inclined to forget how much there is in the world besides that which we anticipate, then works of art… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“Hence Proust’s assertion that the greatness of works of art has nothing to do with the apparent quality of their subject matter,… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
The modern world thinks of art as very important: something close to the meaning of life. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
The claims I'm making for art are simply the claims that we naturally make around music or around poetry. We're much more… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
No one is able to produce a great work of art without experience, nor achieve a worldly position immediately, nor be a… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“The essence of art is that its one case applies to thousands,' knew Schopenhauer.” — alain de botton Copy Share Image
The dream of the news is that it makes us care about other people and situations. But we cannot identify with people… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
There are selections so acute that they come to define a place, with the result that we can no longer travel through… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
I believe that art is a tool and that, like all tools, it has functions. I also think it is important to… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“Valuable elements may be easier to experience in art and in anticipation than in reality. The anticipatory and artistic imaginations omit and… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Art can do the opposite of glamourise the unattainable: it can show us anew the genuine merit of life as we're forced… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
The idea that one might use art for 'instrumental' reasons tends to set off alarm bells at the heart of the cultural… — 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
“What we encounter in works of art and philosophy are objective versions of our own pains and struggles, evoked and defined in… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
One of the unexpectedly important things that art can do for us is to teach us how to suffer more successfully. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“Artistic talent is like a brilliant firework which streaks across a pitch-black night, inspiring awe among onlookers but extinguishing itself in seconds,… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“If we are inclined to forget how much there is in the world besides that which we anticipate, then works of art… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Since the beginning of the 20th century, the public's relationship to art has been weakened by a profound institutional reluctance to address… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Art cannot single-handedly create enthusiasm... it merely contributes to enthusiasm and guides us to be more conscious of feelings that we might… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“A storyteller who provided us with such a profusion of details would rapidly grow maddening. Unfortunately, life itself often subscribes to this… — Alain De Botton Copy Share Image
Religions have always been clearly on to this psycho-therapeutic score. For hundreds of years in the West, Christian art had a very… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“[L]ife is a phenomenon in need of criticism, for we are, as fallen creatures, in permanent danger of worshipping false gods, of… — 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 Image
“He feared that by leaving her he would ruin her life - so he stayed, and did just that.” — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
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 Image
“The Anxiety of Sunday afternoon: your unlived lives and infinite possibility pressing upon the constraints of reality.” — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
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 Image
“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 Image
“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 Image
I like the values associated with a medical family - common sense, being practical but also thoughtful. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“Anyone who urgently needs us deserves, in the true book of love, to be our friend.” — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“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 Image
“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 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
