Alain de Botton Quotes

Fashion is an expression of a time, of a place, of history. It's putting things into context.

If you look at art history, at Goya or Gainsborough, it's always about acknowledging the people of your time who have influence.

As Spectator I wanted to explore photography not as a question (a theme) but as a wound.

When I look at great works of art or listen to inspired music, I sense intimate portraits of the specific times in which they were created.

All films speak to their times. It becomes obvious only after.

A work of art is a world in itself reflecting senses and emotions of the artist's world.

Every work of art is the child of its age and, in many cases, the mother of our emotions. It follows that each period of culture produces an art of its own which can never be repeated.

Culture is the habit of being pleased with the best and knowing why.

Art is to me the glorification of the human spirit, and as such it is the cultural documentation of the time in which it is produced.

We want people to experience art and think about it. The art reflects our time, it is about our culture.

What is Art? It is the response of man's creative soul to the call of the Real.

I always like to leave art and music open to interpretation.

All these actors who died before I was born, all the theaters and the artistic movements - all that stuff fills you up and makes you feel like you're the inheritor of all this information and of all its passion.

How do you make any sense of history, art or literature without knowing the stories and iconography of your own culture and all the world's main religions?

I'm sure we don't read old paintings the way they were intended.

We believed that to understand literature, you had to understand its place in history and culture.

The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and, by analogy, our own experience - more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.

Art is always and everywhere the secret confession, and at the same time the immortal movement of its time.

The real change that paintings undergo is in the perceptions of the viewer.

Literature... is the union of suffering with the instinct for form.

In the finest critics one hears the full cry of the human. They tell one why it matters to read.

Many artists and scholars have pointed out that ultimately art depends on human nature.

The value of writing about art is its effect on the imagination. Paintings allow us to inhabit another culture, place, and time period, and address the issues of those time periods that resonate with our own time.

The thought came to me that all one loves in art becomes beautiful. Beauty is nothing but the expression of the fact that something is being loved. Only thus could she be defined.

I always enjoyed art history because, growing up in California, my exposure was limited, and it was a new experience. To learn the history of art opened up certain things to me, made me see. It intrigued me.