On Love

by Alain de Botton

Can we not be allowed a certain superstitious faith that we will ultimately locate a creature who can appease our painful yearnings?

Until one is close to death, it must be difficult to declare anyone as the love of one’s life.

Seeing through people is so easy, and it gets you nowhere,” remarked Elias Canetti, suggesting how effortlessly and yet how uselessly we can find fault with others.

The telephone becomes an instrument of torture in the demonic hands of a beloved who doesn’t call.

The most attractive are not those who allow us to kiss them at once (we soon feel ungrateful) or those who never allow us to kiss them (we soon forget them), but those who know how to carefully administer varied doses of hope and despair.

“But seriously, if you asked most people whether they believed in love or not, they’d probably say they didn’t. Yet that’s not necessarily what they truly think. It’s just the way they defend themselves against what they want. They believe in it, but pretend they don’t until they’re allowed to.

The bathroom was another chamber of wonders, full of jars, lotions, and perfumes: the shrine of her body, my visit a watery pilgrimage.

I’ve found that it doesn’t really matter who you marry. If you like them at the beginning, you probably won’t like them at the end. And if you start off hating them, there’s always the chance you’ll end up thinking they’re all right.”

“Beauty is the promise of happiness,”

Proust once said, classically beautiful women should be left to men without imagination.

If we locate beauty in the eye of the beholder, what happens when the beholder looks elsewhere?

“By forty, everyone has the face they deserve,”