On Love

by Alain de Botton

The possibility of an alternative love story is a reminder that the life we are leading is only one of a myriad of possible lives, and it is the impossibility of leading them all that plunges us into sadness.

The unknown carries with it a mirror of all our deepest, most inexpressible wishes.

my words were time-bound promises, a truth too disturbing for most relationships to fully take on board, or else couples would have little to talk about other than their fluctuating feelings.

We could define maturity as the ability to give everyone what they deserve when they deserve it, to separate the emotions that belong to, and should be restricted to, oneself from those that should at once be expressed to their initiators, rather than passed on to later and more innocent arrivals.

If philosophers have traditionally advocated a life lived according to reason, condemning in its name a life led by desire, it is because reason is a bedrock of continuity.

There is something appalling in the idea that a person for whom you would sacrifice anything today might in a few months cause you to cross a road or a bookshop to avoid.

One of love’s greatest drawbacks is that, for a while at least, it is in danger of making us seriously happy.

It is part of good manners not to question the criteria responsible for eliciting another’s love. The dream is that one has not been loved for criteria at all, but rather for who one is, an ontological status beyond properties or attributes.

Only poverty, either of love or money, leads one to question the system—perhaps the reason why lovers do not make great revolutionaries.

The longing is that the lover admire us stripped of our external assets, appreciating the essence of our being, ready to repeat the unconditional love said to exist between parent and child.

love. I would prefer you to compliment me on my brain than on my face, but if you must, then I would rather you comment on my smile (motor and muscle–controlled) than on my nose (static and tissue-based).

I dared not think, for fear of what I might find. The freedom to think involves the courage to stumble upon our demons.

It is as if the end of love is already contained in its beginning, the ingredients of love’s collapse eerily foreshadowed by those of its creation.

humiliation could be the only result of loving against all evidence.

Love may be born at first sight, but it does not die with corresponding rapidity.

the futility of something is not always (in love or in politics) a sufficient argument against it.

Certain things are said not because they will be heard, but because it is important to speak.

When you’ve been in love, it is not the length of time that matters, it’s everything you’ve felt and done coming out intensified.

one calls individual actions good or bad quite irrespective of their motives but solely on account of their useful or harmful consequences. Soon, however, one forgets the origin of these designations and believes that the quality good and evil is inherent in the actions themselves, irrespective of their consequences.

3Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, Immanuel Kant, Harper Torchbooks, 1964.

4Elements of Law, Thomas Hobbes, ed. Molesworth, 1839–45.

5Human, All too Human, Friedrich Nietzsche, University ...

Whenever something calamitous happens to us, we are led to look beyond everyday causal explanations in order to understand why we have been singled out to receive such terrible, intolerable punishment.

I saw in happiness a violent denial of reality.

I looked commuters in the face and wondered why they were unbothered by their own meaninglessness.

Surprise is, we are told by psychologists, a reaction to the unexpected, but I had come to expect everything, and could hence be surprised by nothing.

Feelings of virtue breed spontaneously in the fertile soil of suffering. The more one suffers, the more virtuous one must be.

My identity had for so long been forged around “us” that to return to the “I” involved an almost complete reinvention of myself.

I had to revisit almost every physical location, rewrite over every topic of conversation, replay every song and every activity that she and I had shared in order to reconquer them for the present, in order to defuse their associations. But gradually I forgot.

We start trying to be wise when we realize that we are not born knowing how to live, that living one’s life is a skill that has to be acquired, like learning to ride a bicycle or play the piano.

The Bleeding Heart.

are all more intelligent than we are capable, and awareness of the insanity of love has never saved anyone from the disease.

Though love might never be painless and was certainly not wise, neither could it be forgotten. It was as inevitable as it was unreasonable—and its unreason was unfortunately no argument against it.