# Quote — Alain de Botton, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work

> He was reminded of a Dutch book whose moral he often returned to: De Schoonheid van hoogspanningslijnen in het Hollandse landschap, written by a couple of academics in Rotterdam University, Anne Kieke Backer and Arij de Boode. The Beauty of Electricity Pylons in the Dutch Landscape was a defence of the contribution of transmission engineering to the visual appeal of Holland, referencing the often ignored grandeur of the towers on their march from power stations to cities. Its particular interest for Ian, however, lay in its thesis about the history of the Dutch relationship to windmills, for it emphasised that these early industrial objects had originally been felt to have all the pylons’ threateningly alien qualities, rather than the air of enchantment and playfulness now routinely associated with them. They had been denounced from pulpits and occasionally burnt to the ground by suspicious villagers. The re-evaluation of the windmills had in large part been the work of the great painters of the Dutch Golden Age, who, moved by their country’s dependence on the rotating utilitarian objects, gave them pride of place in their canvases, taking care to throw their finest aspect into relief, like their resilience during storms and the glint of their sails in the late afternoon sun. … It would perhaps be left to artists of our own day to teach us to discern the virtues of the furniture of contemporary technology.

- Author: [Alain de Botton](https://www.leafyquotes.com/alain-de-botton.md)
- Book: [The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work](https://www.leafyquotes.com/alain-de-botton/the-pleasures-and-sorrows-of-work.md)
- Page: 212
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Alain_de_Botton#The_Pleasures_and_Sorrows_of_Work_(2009)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/alain-de-botton/the-pleasures-and-sorrows-of-work/he-was-reminded

## More from this book

> To look at the paper is to raise a seashell to one’s ear and to be overwhelmed by the roar of humanity.

p. 237 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/alain-de-botton/the-pleasures-and-sorrows-of-work/to-look-at-the.md)

> Symons … remarked that the most common and unhelpful illusion plaguing those who came to see him was the idea that they ought somehow, in the normal course of events, to have intuited—long before they had finished their degrees, started families, bought houses and risen to the top of law firms—what they should properly be doing with their lives. They were tormented by a residual notion of having through some error or stupidity on their part missed out on their true calling.

p. 113 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/alain-de-botton/the-pleasures-and-sorrows-of-work/symons-remarked-that.md)

> The pre-scientific age, whatever its deficiencies, had at least offered its members the peace of mind that follows from knowing all man-made achievements to be nothing next to the grandeur of the universe. We, more blessed in our gadgetry but less humble in our outlook, have been left … having no more compelling repository of veneration than our brilliant, precise, blinkered and morally troubling fellow human beings.

p. 168 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/alain-de-botton/the-pleasures-and-sorrows-of-work/the-pre-scientific-age.md)