Love reinvents our needs with unique speed. My impatience with the customs ritual indicated that Chloe, who I had not known existed a few hours ago, … - Alain de Botton

A danger of travel is that we see things at the wrong time, before we have had a chance to build up the necessary receptivity and when new information is therefore as useless and fugitive as necklace beads without a connecting chain.

In the end, I’ve found that it doesn’t really matter who you marry. If you like them at the beginning, you probably won’t like them at the end. And if you start off hating them, there’s always the chance you’ll end up thinking they’re all right.

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.