If our lives are dominated by a search for happiness, then perhaps few activities reveal as much about the dynamics of this quest – in all its ardour and paradoxes – than our travels.
ALAIN DE BOTTONTravel agents would be wiser to ask us what we hope to change about our lives rather than simply where we wish to go.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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You need a long hard day’s work to reveal the logic of the craving for very bad tv and alcohol.
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The good parent: someone who doesn’t mind, for a time, being hated by their children.
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These inventors were elevating the formulation of entrepreneurial ideas to the status of a visionary activity. Though forced to justify their efforts in the pragmatic language of venture capital, they were at heart utopian thinkers intent on transforming the world.
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Not everyone is worth listening to.
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Forcing people to eat together is an effective way to promote tolerance.
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A notorious inability to express emotions makes human beings the only animals capable of suicide.
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Never too late to learn some embarrassingly basic, stupidly obvious things about oneself.
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The most attractive are not those who allow us to kiss them at once [we soon feel ungrateful] or those who never allow us to kiss them [we soon forget them], but those who coyly lead us between the two extremes.
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Artistic accounts involve severe abbreviations of what reality will force upon us.
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Anyone who isn’t embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn’t learning enough.
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Literature deserves its prestige for one reason above all others – because it’s a tool to help us live and die with a little bit more wisdom, goodness, and sanity.
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As adults, we try to develop the character traits that would have rescued our parents.
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One kind of good book should leave you asking: how did the author know that about me?
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Maturity: the confidence to have no opinions on many things.
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We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them.
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