It is in books, poems, paintings which often give us the confidence to take seriously feelings in ourselves that we might otherwise never have thought to acknowledge.
It looks like it’s wasting time, but literature is actually the ultimate time-saver - because it gives us access to a range of emotions and events that it would take you years, decades, millennia to try to experience directly. Literature is the greatest reality simulator - a machine that puts you through infinitely more situations than you can ever directly witness.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Literature provides insights into a multitude of human experiences and emotions, saving us time by allowing us to learn vicariously.
In this quote, Alain De Botton emphasizes the value of literature as a powerful tool for understanding the human experience. He suggests that while it may appear that reading is a leisurely activity that consumes time, it actually serves as a profound economy of experience. Literature allows us to access diverse emotions and situations that would otherwise require a lifetime of direct experience, effectively acting as a simulator for reality that expands our understanding of the world and ourselves.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
During a speech about the importance of reading in schools, one could use this quote to highlight how literature enriches students' lives.
More from Alain De Botton
All quotes →Taking architecture seriously therefore makes some singular and strenuous demands upon us...It means conceding that we are inconveniently vulnerable to the colour of our wallpaper and that our sense of purpose may be derailed by an unfortunate bedspread
The more closely we analyze what we consider 'sexy,' the more clearly we will understand that eroticism is the feeling of excitement we experience at finding another human being who shares our values and our sense of the meaning of existence.
Good books put a finger on emotions that are deeply our own - but that we could never have described on our own.
The challenge of modern relationships: how to prove more interesting than the other's smartphone.
It is the most ambitious and driven among us who are the most sorely in need of having our reckless hopes dampened through immersive dousings in the darkness which religions have explored. This is a particular priority for secular Americans, perhaps the most anxious and disappointed people on earth, for their nation infuses them with the most extreme hopes about what they may be able to achieve in their working lives and relationships.
Similar quotes
Bend your minds and wills to the education of the peoples and kindreds of the earth, that haply the dissensions that divide it may, through the power of the Most Great Name, be blotted out from its face, and all mankind become the upholders of one Order, and the inhabitants of one City.
I am naive enough to read incessantly because I cannot, on my own, get to know enough people profoundly enough.
No matter how long you play the guitar, there's always something else to learn.
While the business of education in Europe consists in lectures upon the ruins of Palmyra and the antiquities of Herculaneum , or in disputes about Hebrew points, Greek particles, or the accent and quantity of the Roman language, the youth of America will be employed in acquiring those branches of knowledge which increase the conveniences of life.
There is no education like adversity.
An outline is crucial. It saves so much time. When you write suspense, you have to know where you're going because you have to drop little hints along the way. With the outline, I always know where the story is going. So before I ever write, I prepare an outline of 40 or 50 pages.