“we would not reliably assent to reproduce unless we first had lost our minds.” — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
True love is a lack of desire to check one's smartphone in another's presence. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
I think a certain degree of pessimism is actually helpful to love. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Compatibility is an achievement of love; it shouldn't be its precondition. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
The longing for destiny is nowhere stronger than in our romantic life. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Learning to give up on perfection may be just about the most romantic move any of us could make. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
“When two people part, it is the one who is not in love who makes the tender speeches.” — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
I was uncomfortable writing fiction. My love was the personal essay, rather than the novel. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“It seems as if, in making a marriage, either the individual or the interest of the species must come off badly.” — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
If you are pro love, you have to be a little bit disloyal to the romantic feelings that propel you in the… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“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 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
“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 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
“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
He did not mean to depress us, rather to free us from expectations which inspire bitterness. It is consoling, when love has… — 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
“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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
We fall in love because we long to escape from ourselves with someone as beautiful, intelligent, and witty as we are ugly,… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Every fall into love involves the triumph of hope over self-knowledge. We fall in love hoping we won't find in another what… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
.. if you asked most people whether they believed in love or not, they’d probably say they didn’t. Yet that’s not necessarily… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“Every adult life could be said to be defined by two great love stories. The first - the story of our quest… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“Although it often struggles to be heard in respectable circles, there is an alternative to the Christian-Romantic tenet that sex and love… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“[Donald] Keene observed [in a book entitled The Pleasures of Japanese Literature, 1988] that the Japanese sense of beauty has long sharply… — 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
“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 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
“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
“Maturity means acknowledging that Romantic love might only constitute a narrow and perhaps rather mean-minded aspect of emotional life, one principally focused… — 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 Image
“He feared that by leaving her he would ruin her life - so he stayed, and did just that.” — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
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 Image
“The Anxiety of Sunday afternoon: your unlived lives and infinite possibility pressing upon the constraints of reality.” — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
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 Image
“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 Image
“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 Image
I like the values associated with a medical family - common sense, being practical but also thoughtful. — 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
“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 Image
“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 Image
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 Image
![“[Donald] Keene observed [in a book entitled The Pleasures of Japanese Literature, 1988] that the Japanese sense of beauty has long sharply differed from its Western counterpart: it has been dominated by a love of irregularity rather than symmetry, the impermanent rather than the eternal and the…” quote by Alain de Botton](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/317/alain-de-botton-221_beauty_donald-keene-observed-in-a-book-entitled_2150315.jpg)
