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
“It is hope--with regard to our careers, our love lives, our children, our politicians, and our planet--that is primarily to blame for… — 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
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
“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
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
“It seemed impossible, from within love at least, that this could have been anything but fate. It would have taken a steady… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
I love novels where not much 'happens' but where the interest is in the ideas and analyses of characters. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
One of the better guarantors of ending up in a good relationship: an advanced capacity to be alone. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Often we think love is a feeling: that you spontaneously experience it. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“I will never be able to do or be everything you want, nor vice versa, but I'd like to think we can… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“A person cannot be at once a libertine and a married Romantic, however compelling both paradigms might be.” — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“While a common reaction to seeing a thing of beauty is to want to buy it, our real desire may be not… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
As in all areas, we can improve how good we are at loving another person. — 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
“Academic masochism reflects a metaphysical prejudice that the truth should be a hard-won treasure, that what is read or learnt easily must… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
According to Montaigne, it was the oppressive notion that we had complete mental control over our bodies, and the horror of departing… — 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
“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
