Emily D

“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

“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

“Such intimate communion between our own life and the novels we read may be why Proust argued: "In reality, every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self. the writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument which he offers to the reader to enable him to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have experienced in himself. And the recognition by the reader in his own self of what the book says is the proof of its veracity.”
― Alain de Botton, How Proust Can Change Your Life