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Book: The Architecture of Happiness
Quotes of Book: The Architecture of Happiness
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  1. Alain de Botton _ The Architecture of Happiness

    Analogising architecture with ethics helps us to discern that there is unlikely ever to be a single source of beauty in a building, just as no one quality can ever underpin excellence in a person.
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  2. Alain de Botton _ The Architecture of Happiness

    Precedent forces us to suppose that later generations will one day walk around our houses with the same attitude of horror and amusement with which we now consider many of the possessions of the dead. They will marvel at our wallpapers and our sofas and laugh at aesthetic crimes to which we are impervious. This awareness can lend to our affections a fragile, nervous quality. Knowing that what we now love may in the future, for reasons beyond our current understanding, appear absurd is as hard to bear in the context of a piece of furniture in a shop as it is in the context of a prospective spouse at an altar.
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  3. Alain de Botton _ The Architecture of Happiness

    The notion of buildings that speak helps us to place at the very centre of our architectural conundrums the question of the values we want to live by - rather than merely of how we want things to look.
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  4. Alain de Botton _ The Architecture of Happiness

    To speak of home in relation to a building is simply to recognise its harmony with our own prized internal song.
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  5. Alain de Botton _ The Architecture of Happiness

    What we find beautiful and what we see as attractive are indicators of what we crave in order to become properly 'whole'.
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  6. Alain de Botton _ The Architecture of Happiness

    The fear of forgetting anything precious can trigger in us the wish to raise a structure, like a paperweight to hold down our memories. We might even follow the example of the Countess of Mount Edgcumbe, who in the late eighteenth century had a thirty-foot-high Neoclassical obelisk erected on a hill on the outskirts of Plymouth, in memory of an unusually sensitive pig called Cupid, whom she did not hesitate to call a true friend.
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  7. Alain de Botton _ The Architecture of Happiness

    It has provided not only physical but also psychological sanctuary. It has been a guardian of identity. Over the years, its owners have returned from periods away and, on looking around them, remembered who they were.
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  8. Alain de Botton _ The Architecture of Happiness

    While mourning the number of missed opportunities, we have no reason to abandon a belief in the ever-present possibility of moulding circumstances for the better."
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  9. Alain de Botton _ The Architecture of Happiness

    There is no necessary connection between the concepts of home and of prettiness; what we call a home is merely any place that succeeds in making more consistently available to us the important truths which the wider world ignores, or which our distracted and irresolute selves have trouble holding on to.
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  10. Alain de Botton _ The Architecture of Happiness

    Beauty is the promise of happiness.
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  11. Alain de Botton _ The Architecture of Happiness

    We can be laughed into silence for attempting to speak in praise of phenomena which we lack the right words to describe. We may censor ourselves before others have the chance to do so. We may not even notice that we have extinguished our own curiosity, just as we may forget we had something to say until we find someone who is willing to hear it.
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  12. Alain de Botton _ The Architecture of Happiness

    ...Because beauty is typically the result of a few qualities working in concert, it can take more to guarantee the appeal of a bridge or a house than strength alone. {p 205}
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