Desde el fondo: learning from de Botton

"Another technique artists have used to discover their own identities through an engagement with admired predecessors is that of combination: taking a number of different and well-known influences and combining them in ways that have never yet been tried. The style of Francis Bacon now appears obvious and complete, but the path to this achievement was based on a gradual blending, Bacon was deeply impressed by Vincent van Gogh, as his studies for a portrait of him attest."

Alain de Botton and John Armstrong "Art as Therapy" Page 191.

"How can anyone become a thinker if he does not spend at least a third of the day without passions, people and books?"

Federico Nietzsche in de Botton "The Consolations of Philosophy" Page 219.

"As Nietzsche's beloved Montaigne has explained in the final chapter of his Essays, the art of living lies in finding uses for our adversities: We must lear to suffer whatever we cannot avoid. Our life is composed, like the harmony of the world, of discords as well as of different tones, sweet and harsh, sharp and flat, soft and loud. If a musician lied only some of them, what could he sing? He has got to know how to use all of them and blend them together. So too must we with good and ill, which are of one substance with our life."

"And some 300 years later, Nietzsche returned to the thought: If only we were fruitful filed, we would at bottom let nothing perish unused and see in every event, thing and man welcome manure. How then to be fruitful?"

Federico Nietzsche in de Botton "The Consolations of Philosophy" Page 224