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
“...the truth of the maxim that beauty lies between the extremities of order and complexity.” — 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
“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
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 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
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
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
“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
“...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
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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“[...] 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
“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 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
“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
“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 been able to solve with any particular skill: first, the need to live together in communities in harmony, despite our deeply rooted selfish and violent impulses. And second, the need to cope with terrifying degrees of… — 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 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
![“[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/quotes/img-quotes/317/alain-de-botton-221_beauty_donald-keene-observed-in-a-book-entitled_2150315.jpg)
![“[...] 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/quotes/img-quotes/4f4/alain-de-botton-221_art_what-ruskin-judged-to-be-the-twin-purpos_944356.jpg)
