Alain de Botton Quotes

I think art teaches us how to feel, what our parameters can be, what sensations can be like; it makes you more engaged with life.

Although we read with our minds, the seat of artistic delight is between the shoulder blades. That little shiver behind is quite certainly the highest form of emotion that humanity has attained when evolving pure art and pure science. Let us worship the spine and its tingle.

The first merit of pictures is the effect which they can produce upon the mind; — and the first step of a sensible man should be to receive involuntary effects from them. Pleasure and inspiration first, analysis afterward.

The lower one's vitality, the more sensitive one is to great art.

Man is apt to be more moved by the art of his own period, not because it is more perfect, but because it is organically related to him.

Art can excite, titillate, please, entertain, and sometimes shock; but its ultimate function is to ennoble.

The relation of feeling toward art and its bringing-forth can be one of production or one of reception and enjoyment.

I endeavor to make a picture, for instance, exert a positive influence on the observer by its coloring, mood, and compositional idea, encouraging, say, activation, tranquilization, concentration, or harmony.

Art is a magic which makes the hours melt away and even days dissolve into seconds

Many persons feel art, some understand it; but few both feel and understand it.

The living model, the naked body of a woman, is the privileged seat of feeling, but also of questioning... The model must mark you, awaken in you an emotion which you seek in turn to express.

To be full of joy when looking at an oeuvre is not a little thing.

In my view, it is the most important function of art and science to awaken this feeling and keep it alive in those who are capable of it.

If I could prescribe a single rule for looking at a work of art it would be to enjoy it. If we're honest with ourselves, we have to admit we enjoy our tears just as much as we enjoy our laughter. The only moments of life that are a bore are when we don't care one way or another.

If art is not a medicine for the society, it is a poison.

In our time, we have become too interested in the artist and his or her character and experience as a way of understanding art. In my view, you should be able to read a book or see a film without knowing a single thing about conditions or circumstances or character of the artist, and experience the work to the full without such information. Sometimes I feel - speaking for myself - that people know much too much about me, and I wish people knew less and could just read these books and respond to them purely as words on a page.

If I go to the National Gallery and I look at one of the great paintings that excite me there, it's not so much the painting that excites me as that the painting unlocks all kinds of valves of sensation within me which return me to life more violently.

A critic should always strive to recapture the sense of wonder and surprise with which he first beheld a now-familiar work of art.

Only the very greatest art invigorates without consoling.

I love art. It really changes my mood and wakes me up.

Much of appreciating art or music is really the interpretation of the listener. To a certain extent it's projection - it's what people need or lack in themselves that they then put upon these people that they admire.

I recall an August afternoon in Chicago in 1973 when I took my daughter, then seven, to see what Georgia O’Keeffe had done with where she had been. One of the vast O’Keeffe ‘Sky Above Clouds’ canvases floated over the back stairs in the Chicago Art Institute that day, dominating what seemed to be several stories of empty light, and my daughter looked at it once, ran to the landing, and kept on looking. "Who drew it," she whispered after a while. I told her. "I need to talk to her," she said finally.

Art to be art must soothe.

When I've heard a piece of music or seen a painting that moves me, it gives me something.

There are no personal revelations other than feelings arising from the work itself