I just finished reading, The Architecture of Happiness, by Alain de Botton.  De Botton is one of my top favorite authors--his other great books are How Proust Can Change Your Life, The Consolations of Philosophy, and The Art of Travel.

Here are some inspiring quotes:

Comment From The Observer :  "De Botton wants to encourage his readers, and societies more generally, to pay more attention to the psychological consequences of design in architecture: that architecture should not be treated as an arcane and specialist discipline to be left to professionals, but as something that affects all our lives, our happiness, and our well-being."

On the front flap of the book:

"One of the great but often unmentioned causes of both happiness and misery is the quality of our environment: the kinds of walls, chairs, buildings and streets that surround us.

This book has at its center the large and naive question:  What is a beautiful building?  

De Botton raises the question--What does a building say to us? What does it speak of?

One of his comments (each of his sentences is like an essay of concentrated thought) on page 152 is "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."

He posits that we are attracted to and find beautiful those qualities in a building or work of art that we lack in our lives.  Simply put, we love nature the more when we lack enough contact with nature.

I also love the section on page 261

"In medieval Japan, poets and Zen priests directed the Japanese towards aspects of the world to which Westerners have seldom publicly accorded more than negligible or casual attention:  cherry blossoms, deformed pieces of pottery, raked gravel, moss, rain falling on leaves, autumn skies, roof tiles and unvarnished wood.  A word emerged, wahi, of which no Western language, tellingly, has a direct equivalent, which identified beauty with unpretentious, simple, unfinished transient things.  There was wahi to be enjoyed in an evening spent alone in a cottage in the woods, hearing the rain fall.  There was wahi in old ill-matching sets of crockery, in plain buckets, in walls with blemishes, and in rough, weathered stones covered in moss and lichen.  The most wahi colours were grey, black and brown."

I could go on, but I've got to run...I want to see Vicki Cristina Barcelona tonight.  I just wanted to pass along this book, this author.