Mona Iu

“What we seek, at the deepest level, is inwardly to resemble, rather than physically to possess, the objects and places that touch us through their beauty.”
― Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness

“On project after project, rushed, superficial planning is followed by a quick start that makes everybody happy because shovels are in the ground. But inevitably, the project crashes into problems that were overlooked or not seriously analyzed and dealt with in planning. People run around trying to fix things. More stuff breaks. There is more running around. I call this the “break-fix cycle.” A project that enters it is like a mammoth stuck in a tar pit.”
― Bent Flyvbjerg, How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors That Determine the Fate of Every Project, from Home Renovations to Space Exploration and Everything In Between

“Living, there is no happiness in that. Living: carrying one’s painful self through the world.
But being, being is happiness. Being: Becoming a fountain, a fountain on which the universe falls like warm rain.”
― Milan Kundera, Immortality

“While a common reaction to seeing a thing of beauty is to want to buy it, our real desire may be not so much to own what we find beautiful as to lay permanent claim to the inner qualities it embodies.

Owning such an object may help us realise our ambition of absorbing the virtues to which it alludes, but we ought not to presume that those virtues will automatically or effortlessly begin to rub off on us through tenure. Endeavouring to purchase something we think beautiful may in fact be the most unimaginative way of dealing with the longing it excites in us, just as trying to sleep with someone may be the bluntest response to a feeling of love.

What we seek, at the deepest level, is inwardly to resemble, rather than physically possess, the objects and places that touch us through their beauty.”
― Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness