On Love

by Alain de Botton

We invent a destiny to spare ourselves the anxiety that would arise from acknowledging that the little sense there is in our lives is merely created by ourselves, that there is no scroll (and hence no preordained face awaiting) and that whom we may or may not be meeting on airplanes has no sense beyond what we choose to attribute to it—in short, the anxiety that no one has written our story or assured our loves.

The moment when I would feel that our meeting or not meeting was in the end only an accident, only a probability of 1 in 989.7, would also be the moment when I would have ceased to feel the absolute necessity of a life with her—and thereby have ceased to love her.

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.

Faced with ambiguous signals, what better explanation than shyness: the beloved desires, but is too shy to say so. The seducer who wishes to call his victim shy will never be disappointed.

It is one of the ironies of love that it is easiest confidently to seduce those we are least attracted to.

Silence was damning. A silence with an unattractive person implies they are the boring one. A silence with an attractive one immediately renders it certain you are the tedious party.

Not to find the right words is paradoxically often the best proof that the right words are meant.

When we look at someone (an angel) from a position of unrequited love and imagine the pleasures that being in heaven with them might bring us, we are prone to overlook a significant danger: how soon their attractions might pale if they began to love us back.

Perhaps because the origins of a certain kind of love lie in an impulse to escape ourselves and our weaknesses by an alliance with the beautiful and noble. But if the loved ones love us back, we are forced to return to ourselves, and are hence reminded of the things that had driven us into love in the first place. Perhaps it was not love we wanted after all, perhaps it was simply someone in whom to believe—but how can we continue to believe in the beloved now that they believe in us?

It was perhaps a pedantic matter over which to come to such a decision, but shoes are supreme symbols of aesthetic, and hence by extension psychological, compatibility.

Perhaps the easiest people to fall in love with are those about whom we know nothing.

And what excuse was there for this? Nothing but the old line that parents and politicians will use before taking out their scalpels: I care about you, therefore I will upset you; I have honored you with a vision of how you should be, therefore I will hurt you.

It may be a sign that two people have stopped loving one another (or at least stopped wishing to make the effort that constitutes 90 percent of love) when they are no longer able to spin differences into jokes.

by Stendhal. “Beauty is the promise of happiness,”

The more tempting kind of beauty has only a few angles from which it may be glimpsed, and then not in all lights and at all times. It flirts dangerously with ugliness, it takes risks with itself, it does not side comfortably with mathematical rules of proportion, it draws its appeal from precisely those details that also lend themselves to ugliness. As Proust once said, classically beautiful women should be left to men without imagination.

these stories with no plot and less action, just the central character standing in the center of an almost motionless tale, I was forced to acknowledge that love was a lonely pursuit.

Delusions are not harmful in themselves; they only hurt when one is alone in believing in them, when one cannot create an environment in which they can be sustained.

Whatever the pleasures of discovering mutual loves, nothing compares with the intimacy of landing on mutual hates.

What is an experience? Something that breaks a polite routine and for a brief period allows us to witness things with the heightened sensitivity afforded to us by novelty, danger, or beauty—and it’s on the basis of shared experiences that intimacy is given an opportunity to grow. Friendships nourished solely by occasional dinners will never have the depth of those forged on a trek or at a university. Two people who are surprised by a lion in a jungle clearing will—unless one of them is eaten—be effectively bonded by what they have seen.

To feel whole, we need people in the vicinity who know us as well as, and sometimes better than, we know ourselves.

It takes the intimacy of a lover to point out facets of character that others simply don’t bother with.

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. We were often not mature.

Hate is the hidden script in the letter of love; its foundations are shared with its opposite.

At the end of a relationship, it is the one who is not in love who makes the tender speeches.

According to Immanuel Kant, a moral action is to be distinguished from an immoral one by the fact that it is performed out of duty and regardless of the pain or pleasure involved. I am behaving morally only when I do something without consideration of what I may get in return for it, when I am guided solely by duty: “For any action to be morally good, it is not enough that it should conform to the moral law—it must also be done for the sake of the moral law.”

A notorious inability to express emotions makes human beings the only animals capable of suicide. An angry dog does not commit suicide, it bites the person or thing that made it angry. But an angry human sulks in its room and later shoots itself, leaving a silent note. Man is the symbolic, metaphorical creature: unable to communicate my anger, I would symbolize it in my own death.