Significance of architecture
"...We may need to have made an indelible mark on our lives, to have married the wrong person, pursued an unfulfilling career into middle age or lost a loved one before architecture can begin to have any perceptible impact on us, for when we speak of being 'moved' by a building, we allude into a structure and the sadder wide reality within which we know then to exist. A lump rises in our throat at the sight of beauty from an implicit knowledge that the happiness it hints at is the exception.
Acquaintance with grief turns out to be one of the more unusual pre-requisites of architectural appreciation. We might, quite aside from all other requirements, need to be a little sad before buildings can properly touch us."
- Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness