“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
“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
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
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
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
“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
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
“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
“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
“By conceiving of love as biologically inevitable, key to the continuation of the species, Schopenhauer's theory of the will invites us to… — 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
“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
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
“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
“Children teach us that love is, in its purest form, a kind of service. The word has grown freighted with negative connotations.… — 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
“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
“[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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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 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
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
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
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
“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
“Sex will never be simple or nice in the ways we might like it to be,It is not fundamentally democratic or kind;… — 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
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
I love the idea of a university as away from capitalist values, where people can do things that don't immediately have to… — 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 for sexual… — 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
“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
“The terms avoidant and anxious are hardly typical in a love story, but if Romantic is taken to mean “helpful to the… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“Heartache may be bad for the soul, but it's great for bookshops. It's when we are at our lowest romantic ebb that… — 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
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
“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
“He feared that by leaving her he would ruin her life - so he stayed, and did just that.” — Alain de Botton Copy Share
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
“The Anxiety of Sunday afternoon: your unlived lives and infinite possibility pressing upon the constraints of reality.” — Alain de Botton Copy Share
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
“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
“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
I like the values associated with a medical family - common sense, being practical but also thoughtful. — Alain de Botton Copy Share
“Anyone who urgently needs us deserves, in the true book of love, to be our friend.” — Alain de Botton Copy Share
“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
“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
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
“Does what is praised becomes better? Does an emerald become worse if it isn't praised? And what a gold, ivory, a flower or a… — Alain de Botton Copy Share
The bourgeois thinkers of the eighteenth century thus turned Aristotle's formula on its head: satisfactions which the Greek philosopher had identified with leisure were… — Alain de Botton Copy Share
Reputation matters so much only because people so seldom think for themselves. — Alain de Botton Copy Share
![“[T]he unsympathetic assessments we make of others are usually the result of nothing more sinister than our habit of looking at them in the wrong way, through lenses clouded by distraction, exhaustion and fear, which blind us to the fact that they are really, despite a thousand differences, just…” quote by Alain de Botton](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/i/c16/alain-de-botton-221_altered_t-he-unsympathetic-assessments-we-make-o_2167022.jpg)
