Art Quotes by Alain de Botton

Artistic accounts involve severe abbreviations of what reality will force upon us.

— Alain de Botton

The greatest works of art speak to us without knowing us.

— Alain de Botton

A good half of the art of living is resilience.

— Alain de Botton

The modern world thinks of art as very important: something close to the meaning of life.

— Alain de Botton

“The essence of art is that its one case applies to thousands,' knew Schopenhauer.”

— alain de botton

Art holds out the promise of inner wholeness.

— Alain de Botton

“Art was the very antithesis of crass moralism.”

— Alain de Botton

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

— Alain de Botton

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

One of the unexpectedly important things that art can do for us is to teach us how to suffer more successfully.

— Alain de Botton

In a secularising world, art has replaced religion as a touchstone of our reverence and devotion.

— Alain de Botton

“[...] 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

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

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

In their different ways, art and philosophy help us, in Schopenhauer's words, to turn pain into knowledge.

— Alain de Botton

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

“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

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

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

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

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

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

“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

“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

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

“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

“[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

“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

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

“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

“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

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

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

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

“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

“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

“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

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

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

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