Love Quotes by Alain de Botton

Must being in love always mean being in pain?

— Alain de Botton

Travel is a lot like love.

— Alain de Botton

Love is something that we need to learn.

— Alain de Botton

“Love is a skill, not just an enthusiasm.”

— Alain de Botton

“When two people part, it is the one who is not in love who makes the tender speeches.”

— Alain de Botton

I was uncomfortable writing fiction. My love was the personal essay, rather than the novel.

— Alain de Botton

It is perhaps sad books that best console us when we are sad...

— Alain de Botton

What am I supposed to do here? What am I supposed to think?

— Alain de Botton

Learning to give up on perfection may be just about the most romantic move any of us could make.

— Alain de Botton

“we would not reliably assent to reproduce unless we first had lost our minds.”

— Alain de Botton

One of love's greatest drawbacks is that, for a while at least, it is in danger of making us happy.

— Alain de Botton

Compatibility is an achievement of love; it shouldn't be its precondition.

— Alain de Botton

“Love could not induce us to take on the burden of propagating the species without promising us the greatest happiness we could…

— Alain de Botton

“Repression, a degree of restraint, and a little dedication to self-editing belong to love just as surely as a capacity for explicit…

— Alain de Botton

One rarely falls in love without being as much attracted to what is interestingly wrong with someone as what is objectively healthy.

— Alain de Botton

“Our ‘ego’ or self-conception could be pictured as a leaking balloon, forever requiring the helium of external love to remain inflated and…

— Alain de Botton

I love novels where not much 'happens' but where the interest is in the ideas and analyses of characters.

— Alain de Botton

“Love means admiration for qualities in the lover that promise to correct our weaknesses and imbalances; love is a search for completion.”

— Alain de Botton

Many of our ideas of what love is comes from stories... these are extremely powerful shapers of our attitudes towards love, and…

— Alain de Botton

I'm also interested in the modern suggestion that you can have a combination of love and sex in a marriage - which…

— Alain de Botton

“peculiar, or sad, and yet still deserve a place within the circle of familial love. The parents would thus have created an…

— Alain de Botton

The thing is that love gives us a ringside seat on somebody else's flaws, so of course you're gonna spot some things…

— Alain de Botton

“We should add: it is a privilege to be the recipient of a sulk; it means the other person respects and trusts…

— Alain de Botton

Unrequited love may be painful, but it is safely painful, because it does not involve inflicting damage on anyone but oneself, a…

— Alain de Botton

“We take this idea of love (being loved, rather than loving) with us into adulthood. Grown up, we hope for a re-creation…

— Alain de Botton

We don't sulk with everybody. We limit our sulks to a very particular person: the person who's supposed to love us and…

— Alain de Botton

I'm fascinated by Comte's clear-eyed analysis of what was wrong with modern society, which is that you've got industrial capitalism on one…

— Alain de Botton

“We should add: it is a privilege to be the recipient of a sulk; it means the other person respects and trusts…

— Alain de Botton

“Pain is surprising; we cannot understand why we have been abandoned in love... why we are unable to sleep at night… Identifying…

— Alain de Botton

To be loved by someone is to realize how much they share the same needs that lie at the heart of our…

— Alain de Botton

“Every adult life could be said to be defined by two great love stories. The first - the story of our quest…

— Alain de Botton

“But calm is precisely what is absent from love’s classroom. There is simply too much on the line. The “student” isn’t merely…

— Alain de Botton

In the oasis complex, the thirsty man images he sees water, palm trees, and shade not because he has evidence for the…

— Alain de Botton

“Perhaps we can define love, at once in its familial, sexual and worldly forms, as a kind of respect, a sensitivity on…

— Alain de Botton

“It is precisely when we hear little from our partner which frightens, shocks or sickens us that we should begin to be…

— Alain de Botton

“The very concept of trying to “teach” a lover things feels patronizing, incongruous, and plain sinister. If we truly loved someone, there…

— Alain de Botton

“Marriage: a deeply peculiar and ultimately unkind thing to inflict on anyone one claims to care for.”

— Alain de Botton

“He feared that by leaving her he would ruin her life - so he stayed, and did just that.”

— Alain de Botton

One of the better guarantors of ending up in a good relationship: an advanced capacity to be alone.

— Alain de Botton

As in all areas, we can improve how good we are at loving another person.

— Alain de Botton