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
“In a more evolved world, one a little more alive to the Greek ideal of love, we would perhaps know to be… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
The more familiar two people become, the more the language they speak together departs from that of the ordinary, dictionary-defined discourse. Familiarity… — 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
Endeavoring to purchase something we think beautiful may in fact be the most unimaginative way of dealing with the longing it excites… — 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
Parent and child may both love, but - unbeknown to the child - each party is on a different end of the… — 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
“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
“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
“a lack of love: between a man and a woman is the announcement that what they might produce would only be a… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“The pursuit of personal happiness and the production of healthy children are two radically contrasting projects, which love maliciously confuses us into… — 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
“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
“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
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
“Children may end up being the unexpected teachers of people many times their age, to whom they offer—through their exhaustive dependence, egoism,… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“Marriage: a deeply peculiar and ultimately unkind thing to inflict on anyone one claims to care for.” — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“For the Romantic, it is only the briefest of steps from a glimpse of a stranger to the formulation of a majestic… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
I think a certain degree of pessimism is actually helpful to love. — 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
Compatibility is an achievement of love; it shouldn't be its precondition. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
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 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
“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
