"If you are pro love, you have to be a little bit disloyal to the romantic feelings that propel you in the early days.
Travel is a lot like love.
More Alain de Botton quotes
"One rarely falls in love without being as much attracted to what is interestingly wrong with someone as what is objectively healthy.
"I'm fascinated by Comte's clear-eyed analysis of what was wrong with modern society, which is that you've got industrial capitalism on one side and ro...
"I'm also interested in the modern suggestion that you can have a combination of love and sex in a marriage - which no previous society has ever believ...
"The philosophy I love is very selective. It is really just the bit that is involved in a search for wisdom, and this means a short roll call of names;...
"He feared that by leaving her he would ruin her life - so he stayed, and did just that.
"It's hard loving those who don't much like themselves: "If you're so great, why would you think I'm so great.
"Once a partner has begun to lose interest, there is apparently little the other can do to arrest the process. Like seduction, withdrawal suffers under...
"Why be seduced by something as small as a front door in another country? Why fall in love with a place because it has trams and its people seldom have...
"Everyone endeavours to eliminate through the other individual his own weaknesses, defects, and deviations from the type, lest they be perpetuated or e...
"we would not reliably assent to reproduce unless we first had lost our minds.
"We believe we are seeking happiness in love, but what we are really after is familiarity. We are looking to re-create, within our adult relationships,...
"Marriage: a deeply peculiar and ultimately unkind thing to inflict on anyone one claims to care for.
"Few in this world are ever simply nasty; those who hurt us are themselves in pain. The appropriate response is hence never cynicism nor aggression but...
"To a shameful extent, the charm of marriage boils down to how unpleasant it is to be alone. This isn’t necessarily our fault as individuals. Society a...