Quotes by Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness

Explore a curated collection of 14 quotes by Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness. Discover timeless wisdom, insightful thoughts, and memorable words that have inspired readers around the world. Browse through the gallery below and click on any quote to read more.

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, The Architecture of Happiness
What we seek, at the deepest level, is inwardly to resemble, rather than physically to possess, the objects and places t — Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness
It is in dialogue with pain that many beautiful things acquire their value. Acquaintance with grief turns out to be one — Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness
It is in books, poems, paintings which often give us the confidence to take seriously feelings in ourselves that we migh — Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness
In literature, too, we admire prose in which a small and astutely arranged set of words has been constructed to carry a — Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness
Our sadness won’t be of the searing kind but more like a blend of joy and melancholy: joy at the perfection we see befor — Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness
While a common reaction to seeing a thing of beauty is to want to buy it, our real desire may be not so much to own what — Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness
We need a home in the psychological sense as much as we need one in the physical: to compensate for a vulnerability. We — Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness
We depend on our surroundings obliquely to embody the moods and ideas we respect and then to remind us of them. We look — Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness
It is in dialogue with pain that many beautiful things acquire their value. — Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness
[Donald] Keene observed [in a book entitled The Pleasures of Japanese Literature, 1988] that the Japanese sense of beaut — Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness
what we call a home is merely any place that succeeds in making more consistenly available to us the important truths wh — Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness
For us to deem a work of architecture elegant, it is hence not enough that it look simple: we must feel that the simplic — Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness
Insofar as we appreciate order, it is when we perceive it as being accompanied by complexity, when we feel that a variet — Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness