Homeless

The twenty-four-hour diner, the station waiting room and the motel are sanctuaries for those who have, for noble reasons, failed to find a home in the ordinary world...

-Alain De Botton, The Art of Travel, 51.

Wherever You Go...

A momentous but until then overlooked fact was making itself apparent: I had inadvertently brought myself with me to the island.

-Alain De Botton, The Art of Travel, 19.

So Much for Feng Shui

We are sad at home and blame the weather and the ugliness of the buildings, but on the tropical island we learn (after an argument in a raffia bungalow under an azure sky) that the state of the skies and the appearance of our dwellings can never on their own either underwrite our joy or condemn us to misery.

-Alain De Botton, The Art of Travel, 25.

Other People's Heads

Other people's heads are too wretched a place for true happiness to have its seat.

- Alain de Botton, Status Anxiety

The Wrong Things

If we cannot stop envying, it seems especially poignant that we should be constrained to spend so much of our lives envying the wrong things.

- Alain de Botton, Status Anxiety

Howling and Stubborn Characters

Babies cannot, by definition, repay their caretakers with worldly rewards. In so far as they are loved and looked after, it is therefore for who they are, identity understood in its barest, most stripped-down state. They are loved for, or in spite of, their uncontrolled, howling and stubborn characters.

- Alain de Botton, Status Anxiety

Two Love Stories

Every adult life could be said to be defined by two great love stories. The first--the story of our quest for sexual love--is well known and well charted, its vagaries form the staple of music and literature, it is socially acceptable and celebrated. The second--the story of our quest for love from the world--is a more secret and shameful tale. If mentioned, it tends to be in caustic, mocking terms, as something of interest chiefly to envious or deficient souls, or else the drive for status is interpreted in an economic sense alone. And yet this second love story is no less intense than the first, it is no less complicated, important or universal, and its setbacks are no less painful. There is heartbreak here too.

-Alain de Botton, Status Anxiety

Time...is Marching On

Our ancestors could believe that their achievements had a chance of bearing up against the flow of events. We know time to be a hurricane. Our buildings, our sense of style, our ideas, all of these will soon enough be anachronisms, and the machines in which we now take inordinate pride will seem no less bathetic than Yorick's skull.

-Alain de Botton, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, 320.

Bean Counters

History may dwell on stories of heroism and drama, but there are ultimately few of us out on the high seas, and many of us in the harbour, counting the ropes and untangling the anchor chains.

-Alain de Botton, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, 241.

Idle Thoughts

I concluded that there were few troubling situations in contemporary life from which one could not distract oneself by wondering where the electricity had arrived from.

-Alain de Botton, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, 209.