One of love's greatest drawbacks is that, for a while at least, it is in danger of making us happy. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Compatibility is an achievement of love; it shouldn't be its precondition. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Often we think love is a feeling: that you spontaneously experience it. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“Anyone who urgently needs us deserves, in the true book of love, to be our friend.” — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Although I don't believe in God, Bach's music shows me what a love of God must feel like. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
The longing for destiny is nowhere stronger than in our romantic life. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
I keep a picture of my beloved children close by. Also, water and plenty of pads and pens. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Though debts are condemned in the financial world, the world of friendship and love may perversely depend on well-managed debts. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
In the early days of love sometimes, you will report an ecstatic feeling you have met someone who seems to understand you… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
What we typically call love is only the start of love. Our understanding of love has been hijacked and beguiled by its… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“One of love’s greatest drawbacks is that, for a while at least, it is in danger of making us seriously happy. 2. Chloe” — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“A marriage doesn't begin with a proposal, or even an initial meeting. It begins far earlier, when the idea of love is… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“Our understanding of love has been hijacked and beguiled by its first distractingly moving moments. We have allowed our love stories to… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
The romantic person instinctively sees marriage in terms of emotions, but what a couple actually gets up to together over a lifetime… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“He will surmise that love can endure only when one is unfaithful to its beguiling opening ambitions, and that, for his relationships… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
We each appear to hold within ourselves a range of divergent views as to our native qualities.. And amid such uncertainty, we… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
“Everyone endeavours to eliminate through the other individual his own weaknesses, defects, and deviations from the type, lest they be perpetuated or… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
If it is true that love is the pursuit in another of qualities we lack in ourselves, then in our love of… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
If cynicism and love lie at opposite ends of a spectrum, do we not sometimes fall in love in order to escape… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
“The business of repatriating emotions emerges as one of the most delicate and necessary tasks of love. To accept the risks of… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“MLPs can similarly make us feel less lonely. After being abandoned by a lover who has expressed in the kindest way imaginable… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Perhaps because the origins of a certain kind of love lie in an impulse to escape ourselves and out weaknesses by an… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“Heartache may be bad for the soul, but it's great for bookshops. It's when we are at our lowest romantic ebb that… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
The greatest difficulty of Travel is that one is forced to take oneself along. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“For many, the point of marriage isn't so much to be in love as to stop having to think of love.” — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Work finally begins when the fear of doing nothing exceeds the fear of doing it badly. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
I don't want to say that our expectations of love are too high; it's just that if we're to meet them, we… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
We are all more intelligent than we are capable, and awareness of the insanity of love has never saved anyone from the… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Love is an incurable disease. In love, there is permanent suffering. Those who love and those who are happy are not the… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Every adult life could be said to be defined by two great love stories: the story of our quest for sexual love… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“To be mature is, we're told, to move beyond possessiveness. Jealousy is for babies. The mature person knows that no one owns anyone.” — Alain de Botton Copy Share
“He feared that by leaving her he would ruin her life - so he stayed, and did just that.” — Alain de Botton Copy Share
You have to be quite heavily invested in someone to do them the honour of telling them you're annoyed with them. — Alain de Botton Copy Share
“The Anxiety of Sunday afternoon: your unlived lives and infinite possibility pressing upon the constraints of reality.” — Alain de Botton Copy Share
Those who divorce aren't necessarily the most unhappy, just those neatly able to believe their misery is caused by one other person. — Alain de Botton Copy Share
“We could not be fulfilled if we weren't inauthentic some of the time—inauthentic, that is, in relation to such things as our passing desires… — Alain de Botton Copy Share
“Insofar as we appreciate order, it is when we perceive it as being accompanied by complexity, when we feel that a variety of elements… — Alain de Botton Copy Share
I like the values associated with a medical family - common sense, being practical but also thoughtful. — Alain de Botton Copy Share
“Anyone who urgently needs us deserves, in the true book of love, to be our friend.” — Alain de Botton Copy Share
“We can then recognize that we invented religions to serve two central needs which continue to this day and which secular society has not… — Alain de Botton Copy Share
“Half the ingratitude and complacency in the world down to how slowly and imperceptibly most good and bad things unfold.” — Alain de Botton Copy Share
It is perhaps when our lives are at their most problematic that we are likely to be most receptive to beautiful things. — Alain de Botton Copy Share
“Does what is praised becomes better? Does an emerald become worse if it isn't praised? And what a gold, ivory, a flower or a… — Alain de Botton Copy Share
The bourgeois thinkers of the eighteenth century thus turned Aristotle's formula on its head: satisfactions which the Greek philosopher had identified with leisure were… — Alain de Botton Copy Share
Reputation matters so much only because people so seldom think for themselves. — Alain de Botton Copy Share
