“A spouse who gets angry at having been betrayed is evading a basic, tragic truth: that no one can be everything to… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
We are properly ready for marriage when we are strong enough to embrace a life of frustration. — 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
To a shameful extent, the charm of marriage boils down to how unpleasant it is to be alone. — 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
What is fascinating about marriage is why anyone wants to get married. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Choosing a spouse and a choosing career: the two great decisions for which society refuses to set up institutional guidance. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“It seems as if, in making a marriage, either the individual or the interest of the species must come off badly.” — 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
Fantasies can be great, but we shouldn't make the wedding a fantasy, because the wedding is the gateway to married life. It… — 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… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
The death of marriage has been announced so often and would seem so normal, in a sense. So what's surprising is 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
I think people want to get married to end their emotional uncertainty. In a way, they want to end powerful feelings, or… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
You will often be in despair. You will sometimes think it's the worst decision in your life. That's fine. That's not 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
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
“In an ideal world, marriage vows would be entirely rewritten. At the altar, a couple would speak thus: “We accept not to… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“The benefits of a philosophy of neo-religious pessimism are nowhere more apparent than in relation to marriage, one of modern society’s most… — 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
“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
