Alain de Botton May Quotations

What we find exotic abroad may be what we hunger for in vain at home.

...if the beginnings of love and amorous politics are equally rosy, then the ends may be equally bloody.

He was marked out by his relentless ability to find fault with others' mediocrity--suggesting that a certain type of intelligence may be at heart nothing more or less than a superior capacity for dissatisfaction.

The true nature of bureaucracy may be nowhere more obvious to the observer than in a developing country, for only there will it still be made manifest by the full complement of documents, files, veneered desks and cabinets - which convey the strict and inverse relationship between productivity and paperwork.

Happiness may be difficult to obtain. The obstacles are not primarily financial.

The origins and travels of our purchases remain matters of indifference, although to the more imaginative at least a slight dampness at the bottom of a carton, or an obscure code printed along a computer cable, may hint at processes of manufacture and transport nobler and more mysterious, more worthy of wonder and study, than the very goods themselves.

Wealth is not an absolute. It is relative to desire. Every time we yearn for something we cannot afford, we grow poorer, whatever our resources. And every time we feel satisfied with what we have, we can be counted as rich, however little we may actually possess.

The happiness that may emerge from taking a second look is central to Proust's therapeutic conception. It reveals the extent to which our dissatisfactions may be the result of failing to look properly at our lives rather than the result of anything inherently deficient about them.

Every time we feel satisfied with what we have, we can be counted as rich, however little we may actually possess.

There may be significant things to learn about people by looking at what annoys them most.

Do you love me enough that I may be weak with you? Everyone loves strength, but do you love me for my weakness? That is the real test.