For thousands of years, it had been nature--and its supposed creator--that had had a monopoly on awe. It had been the icecaps, the deserts, the volcanoes and the glaciers that had given us a sense of finitude and limitation and had elicited a feeling in which fear and respect coagulated into a strangely pleasing feeling of humility, a feeling which the philosophers of the eighteenth century had famously termed the sublime. But then had come a transformation to which we were still the heirs.. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the dominant catalyst for that feeling of the sublime had ceased to be nature. We were now deep in the era of the technological sublime, when awe could most powerfully be invoked not by forests or icebergs but by supercomputers, rockets and particle accelerators. We were now almost exclusively amazed by ourselves. Alain De Botton
About This Quote

This quote is about how society views technology today. The world once admired and worshiped nature, but now we worship technology and machines. Many people today admire and worship technology and machines and don’t think anything is more amazing than these machines or creations. They give us ideas of what we can accomplish with technology and how it will change the world. If you want to change the world, you can do it by changing these people’s viewpoints.

Source: The Pleasures And Sorrows Of Work

Some Similar Quotes
  1. The sunlight claps the earth, and the moonbeams kiss the sea: what are all these kissings worth, if thou kiss not me? - Percy Bysshe Shelley
  2. In youth, it was a way I had, To do my best to please. And change, with every passing lad To suit his theories. But now I know the things I know And do the things I do, And if you do not like me... - Dorothy Parker
  3. If I were a tree, I would have no reason to love a human. - Maggie Stiefvater
  4. A kiss is a lovely trick designed by nature to stop speech when words become superfluous. - Ingrid Bergman
  5. This life is yours. Take the power to choose what you want to do and do it well. Take the power to love what you want in life and love it honestly. Take the power to walk in the forest and be a part of... - Susan Polis Schutz
More Quotes By Alain De Botton
  1. One rarely falls in love without being as much attracted to what is interestingly wrong with someone as what is objectively healthy.
  2. There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life.
  3. There's a whole category of people who miss out by not allowing themselves to be weird enough.
  4. The moment we cry in a film is not when things are sad but when they turn out to be more beautiful than we expected them to be.
  5. The price we have paid for expecting to be so much more than our ancestors is a perpetual anxiety that we are far from being all we might be.
Related Topics