On Love

by Alain de Botton

The conversation meandered, affording us glimpses of one another’s characters, like the brief vistas one catches on a winding mountain road—this

I lost the ability to consider the question of predestination with the necessary skepticism.

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.

Every fall into love involves the triumph of hope over self-knowledge.

I knew the void that romantic intoxication could fill, I knew the exhilaration that comes from identifying someone, anyone, as admirable.

To speak of love after we had barely spent a morning together was to encounter charges of romantic delusion and semantic folly.

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.

Cupid’s arrow greatly easier to send than receive.

But as soon as love is reciprocated, one must be prepared to give up the passivity of simply being hurt to take on the responsibility of perpetrating hurt oneself.

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.

“It is not customary to love what one has.”

It promptly seemed easier to love Chloe without knowing her.

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

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.

“Beauty is the promise of happiness,”

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

“Some people would never have fallen in love if they had never heard of love,”

ove reveals its insanity by its refusal to acknowledge the inherent normality of the loved one.

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.

Perhaps it is true that we do not really exist until there is someone there to see us existing; that we cannot properly speak until there is someone there who can understand what we are saying; that, in essence, we are not wholly alive until we are loved.

Even being loved implies a gross bias—a pleasant distortion, but a distortion nevertheless.

Because in resolving our need to love, we do not always succeed in resolving our need to long.

I may have loved Chloe but because I knew Chloe, I did not long for her.

Lovers may kill their own love story for no other reason than that they are unable to tolerate

the uncertainty, the sheer risk, that their experiment in happiness has delivered.

honesty is sometimes more than we have strength for

living one’s life is a skill that has to be acquired, like learning to ride a bicycle or play the piano.