Often we think love is a feeling: that you spontaneously experience it. — 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
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
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 shown love is to feel ourselves the object of concern: our presence is noted, our name is registered, our views… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
The philosophy I love is very selective. It is really just the bit that is involved in a search for wisdom, and… — 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
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
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
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
“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 been able to solve with any particular skill: first, the need to live together in communities in harmony, despite our deeply rooted selfish and violent impulses. And second, the need to cope with terrifying degrees of… — Alain de Botton Copy Share
“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
