On Love

by Alain de Botton

The longing for a destiny is nowhere stronger than in our romantic life.

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

the anxiety that no one has written our story or assured our loves.

How could I have imagined that the role Chloe came to play in my life could equally well have been filled by someone else, when it was with her eyes that I had fallen in love, and her way of draining pasta, combing her hair, and ending a phone conversation?

My mistake was to confuse a destiny to love with a destiny to love a given person. It was the error of thinking that Chloe, rather than love, was inevitable.

Do we not fall in love partly out of a momentary will to suspend seeing through people, even at the cost of blinding ourselves a little in the process?

If cynicism and love lie at opposite ends of a spectrum, do we not sometimes fall in love in order to escape the debilitating cynicism to which we are prone?

what mattered was not so much what she was saying as the fact she was saying it—and that I had decided to find perfection in everything she could utter.

What is so frightening is the extent to which we may idealize others when we have such trouble tolerating ourselves—because we have such trouble. . . .

Every fall into love involves the triumph of hope over self-knowledge. We fall in love hoping we won’t find in another what we know is in ourselves, all the cowardice, weakness, laziness, dishonesty, compromise, and stupidity. We throw a cordon of love around the chosen one and decide that everything within it will somehow be free of our faults. We locate inside another a perfection that eludes us within ourselves, and through our union with the beloved hope to maintain (against the evidence of all self-knowledge) a precarious faith in our species.

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

we can perhaps only ever fall in love without knowing quite whom we have fallen in love with.

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

You can’t suppose that there’s one quality called “love”—people mean such different things by the word.

the burning question of who we were and would be to one another.

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.

the clumsiest seducers could generously be deemed the most genuine. Not to find the right words is paradoxically often the best proof that the right words are meant.

the patience and intelligence required to fathom someone else went far beyond the capacities of my anxious, infatuated mind.