Artistic accounts involve severe abbreviations of what reality will force upon us. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
I'm not an academic philosopher, and don't agree with the way the universities approach the subject. I'm a philosopher only in the… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
In their different ways, art and philosophy help us, in Schopenhauer's words, to turn pain into knowledge. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
In 'Art as Therapy', we argue that art is a tool that can variously help to inspire, console, redeem, guide, comfort, expand… — 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
We have to put aside the customary historical reading of works of art in order to invite art to respond to certain… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“religions merit our attention for their sheer conceptual ambition; for changing the world in a way that few secular institutions ever have.… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“Ideally, art would give us the answers that other people don't. This might even be one of the main points of literature:… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
I'm fascinated by Comte's clear-eyed analysis of what was wrong with modern society, which is that you've got industrial capitalism on one… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Philosophy, art, politics, religion and bohemia have never sought to do away entirely with the status hierarchy; they have attemptee, rather, to… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
If buying art is to matter to us deeply, then it has to engage with our emotions and bring something to what… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“religions merit our attention for their sheer conceptual ambition; for changing the world in a way that few secular institutions ever have.… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Bad art might be defined as a series of bad choices about what to show and what to leave out. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
The essential argument in the book, 'Art as Therapy,' is that art enjoys such financial and cultural prestige that it's easy to… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
A world where a majority had imbibed the lessons implicit within tragic art would be one in which the consequences of our… — 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
