Alain de Botton Quotes

Our job is not to set things right but to see them right.

Wise is the man who does not disdain any character and instead, examining him with a searching look, plumbs him to the very main-springs of his being.

The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.

Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it.

Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them.

A weed is no more than a flower in disguise, Which is seen through at once, if love give a man eyes.

I wanted to write about looking at the world, so it's more about helping people, or persuading people, to see what is around us; both the marvellous and the terrible.

Beckett had an unerring light on things, which I much appreciated.

It takes little talent to see what lies under one's nose, a good deal to know in what direction to point that organ.

Once you really commence to see things, then you really commence to feel things.

To look is one thing, to see is another thing; to see is very difficult, normally; to look is to try to see. I have looked and I hope I have seen.

Blessed are they who see beautiful things in humble places where other people see nothing.

Anything looked at closely becomes wonderful.

See into life, don't just look at it.

No object is mysterious. The mystery is your eye.

The few wonders of the world only exist while there are those with the sight to see them.

It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.

I'm not such a fan of imagination. If you're alive to details, they oftentimes suggest a richer or deeper imaginative line than you would have imagined.

I think my life has been transformed by the ability to take things that exist in the world and look at them more closely. I think that's what art does at its best: it allows us to slow down.

We spend so much time listening to the things people are saying that we rarely pay attention to the things they don't.

It's an interesting education to listen to cricket commentary when you're not at the game. When you're there, which is most of the time for me, it flows over you. But when you're not there, you look at it in a slightly different way. You pick up things.

Everything is surprising, rightly seen.

All you have to do to make something interesting is to look at it long enough.

Important lessons: look carefully; record what you see. Find a way to make beauty necessary; find a way to make necessity beautiful.

Beauty exists where you least expect to find it.