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
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
“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
“When two people part, it is the one who is not in love who makes the tender speeches.” — 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
“Lovers cannot remain philosophers for long, they should give way to the religious impulse, which is to believe and have faith, as… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“Love stories begin not when we fear someone may be unwilling to see us again, but when they decide they would have… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“If we wanted to think about it,’ wrote Proust, ‘perhaps there is no really loving mother who could not, on her dying… — 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
I fell in love with Norman Mailer's 'Of a Fire on the Moon', a description of the 1969 moon landing and the… — 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
“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
“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
“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
The longing for destiny is nowhere stronger than in our romantic life. — 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
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
“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
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
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
“we would not reliably assent to reproduce unless we first had lost our minds.” — 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
