Beauty Quotes by Alain de Botton

I am a very aesthetic person.

— Alain de Botton

“Beauty is a promise of happiness.”

— Alain de Botton

“...the truth of the maxim that beauty lies between the extremities of order and complexity.”

— Alain de Botton

A successful work will draw out the features capable of exciting a sense of beauty and interest in the spectator.

— Alain de Botton

“It is in dialogue with pain that many beautiful things acquire their value.”

— Alain de Botton

“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

“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

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

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

“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

“[...] 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

“...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

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

“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

“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

“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

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

“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

“[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

“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

“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

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

“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

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

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