Alain de Botton Quotes

All explorers are seeking something they have lost. It is seldom that they find it, and more seldom still that the attainment brings them greater happiness than the quest.

Every human being has the right to search for happiness, and by 'happiness' is meant something that makes other people feel content.

I'm doing great in England.

The fact is always obvious much too late, but the most singular difference between happiness and joy is that happiness is a solid and joy a liquid.

Love is the beauty and the strength of all societies and the great pleasure of our lives on earth.

The journey is what brings us happiness not the destination.

So I have loitered my life away, reading books, looking at pictures, going to plays, hearing, thinking, writing on what pleased me best. I have wanted only one thing to make me happy, but wanting that have wanted everything.

The instruments for the quest for Truth are as simple as they are difficult.

Life is a sleep, love is a dream; and you have lived if you have loved.

We all look for happiness, but without knowing where to find it: like drunkards who look for their house, knowing dimly that they have one.

Love is, without question life's greatest experience.

The longer we lived with it the more we wanted something less about process and more about life.

We cannot get happiness by striving after it, and yet with an effort we can impart it.

Happiness! Can any human being undertake to define it for another?

I have enjoyed the happiness of the world; I have loved.

I've always believed that happiness is just around the corner. The trick is fining the right corner.

Forget purpose. It’s okay to be happy without one. The quest for a single purpose has ruined many lives.

Do not judge but love and be loved, if you want to be really happy.

Success is how you collect your minutes. You spend millions of minutes to reach one triumph, one moment, then you spend maybe a thousand minutes enjoying it. If you were unhappy through those millions of minutes, what good is the thousand minutes of triumph? It doesn't equate... Life is made of small pleasures. Good eye contact over the breakfast table with your wife. A moment of touching a friend. Happiness is made of those tiny successes. The big ones come too infrequently. If you don't have all those zillions of tiny successes, the big ones don't mean anything.

I believe in the supreme worth of the individual and in his right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Love is the essence of a full and wonderful life.

Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over again in the quietest chambers. The mind can never break off from the journey.

There is a point. I don't know what it is, but everything I've had, and everything I've lost, and everything I felt-it meant something. Maybe there isn't a meaning to life. Maybe there's only a meaning to living. That's what I've learned. That's what I'm going to be doing from now on. Living. And loving, as sappy as it sounds

A pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered. You are speaking, Hmán, as if pleasure were one thing and the memory another. It is all one thing.