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

A dominant impulse on encountering beauty is to wish to hold on to it, to possess it and give it weight in one’s life. There is an urge to say, ‘I was here, I saw this and it mattered to me.

The most uncouth of our afflictions is to despise our being. Rather than trying to cut ourselves in two, we should cease waging civil war on our perplexing physical envelopes and learn to accept them as unalterable facts of our condition; neither so terrible, nor so humiliating.

It is striking how much more seriously we are likely to be taken after we have been dead a few centuries.