“Every adult life could be said to be defined by two great love stories. The first—the story of our quest for sexual… — 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
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
“[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
“[T]he unsympathetic assessments we make of others are usually the result of nothing more sinister than our habit of looking at them… — 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
“Why be seduced by something as small as a front door in another country? Why fall in love with a place because… — 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
...if the beginnings of love and amorous politics are equally rosy, then the ends may be equally bloody. — 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
It's hard loving those who don't much like themselves: "If you're so great, why would you think I'm so great. — 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
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
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
Perhaps the easiest people to fall in love with are those about whom we know nothing. Romances are never as pure as… — 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
Used to do a lot of falling in love with people, almost in the street, and imagining that there would be no… — 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
“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
Life gives us no such handy markers - a storm comes, and far from this being a harbinger of death and collapse,… — 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 happy. — 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
“Was my sense of being in love not just the result of living in a particular cultural epoch? Was it not society,… — 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
“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
“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
