On Love

by Alain de Botton

The language of the eye stubbornly resists translation into the language of words.

It was not beauty that I could hope to describe, only my personal response to Chloe’s appearance.

Kant’s view, as expressed in his Critique of Judgment, that aesthetic judgments are ones “whose determining ground can be no other than subjective.”

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

I had animated her face with her soul.

A subjective theory of beauty makes the observer wonderfully indispensable.

She had experienced a betrayal at the hands of language, discovered the way intimate words may be converted to a common currency, and had since hidden behind a veil of practicality and irony.

I felt like a dandelion releasing hundreds of spores into the air—and not knowing if any of them would get through.

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

scant regard traditionally given to love in Chinese culture.

Chinese culture is “situation-centered” and concentrates on groups rather than couples and their love

She really was adorable (thought the lover, a most unreliable witness in such matters).

At the moment when I most wanted language to be original, personal, and completely private, I came up against the irrevocably public nature of emotional language.

The charm I detected in these trivial gestures revealed a readiness to accept almost anything as incontestable proof she was perfect. What did I see in her? Almost everything.

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

I was forced to acknowledge that love was a lonely pursuit.

Desperate needs bring about a hallucination of their solution: thirst hallucinates water, the need for love hallucinates a prince or princess.

Doubt is easy when it is not a matter of survival: we are as skeptical as we can afford to be, and it is easiest to be skeptical about things that do not fundamentally sustain us. It is easy to doubt the existence of a table; it is hell to doubt the legitimacy of love.

What in us really wants “truth”? . . . We ask the value of this. . . . Why not rather untruth? and uncertainty? even ignorance? . . . The falseness of a judgement is not necessarily an objection to it. . . . The question is to what extent it is life-advancing;

Even though the odds were in favor of God’s not existing, Pascal argued that religious faith could still be justified because the joys of the slimmer probability so far outweighed the abomination of the larger one. And so it should perhaps be with love.

Lovers cannot remain philosophers for long; they should give way to the religious impulse, which is to believe and have faith, as opposed to the philosophic impulse, which is to doubt and inquire.

So long as both Chloe and I could preserve the yolk of love intact, what did it matter quite what the truth was?

Habits began to leak between us:

We could risk intervals of silence; we were no longer paranoid talkers, unwilling to let the conversation drop lest tranquillity seem unfaithful.

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

We even started to acquire a story. Love seems indispensably connected to stories.

Powering most love stories are obstacles.

classic romantic couples prove the strength of their love by the vigor with which they overcome adversities.

Our parents didn’t care, the jungle had been tamed, society hid its disapproval behind universal tolerance, restaurants stayed open late, credit cards were accepted almost everywhere, and sex was a duty, not a crime.

it’s on the basis of shared experiences that intimacy is given an opportunity to grow.

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.

The bizarreness of the incident meant that, as with the corpse, only more lightheartedly, it became something of a leitmotif in our relationship, an incident in our story to which we constantly alluded.

the essence of leitmotifs is that they refer back to incidents others cannot understand because they were absent from the founding scene.

joint experiences—people we had encountered or things we had seen, done, or heard—which helped to create a common heritage.

these leitmotifs were important, because they gave us the feeling that we were far from strangers to one another, that we had lived through things together, and remembered the meanings we had jointly derived from them.

Chloe and I had created something of a world together.

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.

humans need one another in order to define themselves and achieve self-consciousness,

“A man can acquire anything in solitude except a character,” wrote Stendhal,

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

is it not comforting to be able to find refuge from the dangers of invisibility in the arms of someone who has our identity firmly in mind?

semantically speaking, love and interest are almost interchangeable,

To love someone is to take a deep interest in them, and by such concern, to bring them to a richer sense of ...

I was afforded a chance to mature, thanks to the insights into my personality that Chloe afforded me. It takes the intimacy of a lover to point out facets of character that others simply don’t bother with.

It was a long time before I was in any position to help Chloe to feel understood. Only slowly did I begin to unearth, from among the millions of words she spoke and actions she performed, the great themes of her life.

I slowly learnt to identify some key threads in Chloe’s personality.

I began detecting her awkwardness with other women and her greater ease with men.

Chloe slowly assumed a complex coherence in my mind, someone with consistency and a degree of predictability, someone whose tastes in a film or a person I could now begin to guess without asking.

Everyone returns us to a different sense of ourselves, for we become a little of who they think we are.

She had tried to be lively, and yet the suspicions of the two strangers facing her across the table had stopped her from expanding into her usual self.