A storyteller who provided us with such a profusion of details would rapidly grow maddening. Unfortunately, life itself often subscribes to this mode of storytelling, wearing us out with repetition, misleading emphases and inconsequential plot lines. It insists on showing us Bardak Electronics, the saftey handle in the car, a stray dog, a Christmas card and a fly that lands first on the rim and then in the centre of the ashtray. Which explains how the curious phenomenon whereby valuable elements may be easier to experience in art and in anticipation than in reality. The anticipatory and artistic imaginations omit and compress; they cut away the periods of boredom and direct our attention to critical moments, and thus, without either lying or embellishing, they lend to life a vividness and a coherence that it may lack in the distracting wooliness of the present. Alain De Botton
About This Quote

This quote is a melding of two famous quotes, "Life imitates art and art imitates life." and “The more we know about life the less we know about life.” By taking these two quotes and concentrating on how they can be true at the same time, we come up with this quote. Life may not imitate art as the two things are completely different but one thing that is similar is that both life and art may be dull and boring at times. However, at those moments there are important parts of life that can be seen in art. For example, whenever we see a story our imagination runs wild with the different possibilities of what could happen next. The more we can imagine what might happen next, the more exciting it becomes.

Source: The Art Of Travel

Some Similar Quotes
  1. Eleanor was right. She never looked nice. She looked like art, and art wasn't supposed to look nice; it was supposed to make you feel something. - Rainbow Rowell
  2. It is good to love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is well done. - Vincent Van Gogh
  3. Any fool can be happy. It takes a man with real heart to make beauty out of the stuff that makes us weep. - Clive Barker
  4. Art and love are the same thing: It’s the process of seeing yourself in things that are not you. - Chuck Klosterman
  5. There is nothing more truly artistic than to love people. - Vincent Van Gogh
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.
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