Emily D

“To make [reading] into a discipline is to give too large a role to what is only an incitement. Reading is on the threshold of the spiritual life; it can introduce us to it: it does not constitute it.

Even the finest books deserve to be thrown aside.”
― Alain de Botton, How Proust Can Change Your Life

“He (Proust) tells us, for instance, that there are two methods by which a person can acquire wisdom, painlessly via a teacher or painfully via life, and he proposes that the painful variety is far superior...
"We cannot be taught wisdom, we have to discover it for ourselves by a journey which no one can undertake for us, an effort which no one can spare us.”
― Alain de Botton, How Proust Can Change Your Life

“Though we can of course use our minds without being in pain, Proust's suggestion is that we become properly inquisitive only when distressed. We suffer, therefore we think, and we do so because thinking helps us to place pain in context. It helps us to understand its origins, plot its dimensions, and reconcile ourselves to its presence.”
― Alain de Botton, How Proust Can Change Your Life

“Using a single word to describe two different things suggests a disregard for the world's real diversity which bears comparison with that shown by the cliché user.”
― Alain de Botton, How Proust Can Change Your Life