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If you are pro love, you have to be a little bit disloyal to the romantic feelings that propel you in the early days.

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One rarely falls in love without being as much attracted to what is interestingly wrong with someone as what is objectively healthy.

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You have to be quite heavily invested in someone to do them the honour of telling them you're annoyed with them.

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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...more

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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...more

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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;...more

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He feared that by leaving her he would ruin her life - so he stayed, and did just that.

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Travel is a lot like love.

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Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone - and finding that that's ok with them.

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It's hard loving those who don't much like themselves: "If you're so great, why would you think I'm so great.

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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...more

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We seem to be unable to resist overstating every aspect of ourselves: how long we are on the planet for, how much it matters what we achieve, how rare...more

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The quickest way to stop noticing something, may be to buy it—just as the quickest way to stop appreciating someone may be to marry him or her.

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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...more

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Everyone endeavours to eliminate through the other individual his own weaknesses, defects, and deviations from the type, lest they be perpetuated or e...more