Alain de Botton: Quotes about love

Alain de Botton is Swiss writer. Explore interesting quotes on love.
Alain de Botton: 292 quotes62 likes

“Do you love me enough that I may be weak with you? Everyone loves strength, but do you love me for my weakness? That is the real test.”

Alain de Botton

“Love is an incurable disease. In love, there is permanent suffering. Those who love and those who are happy are not the same.”

Alain de Botton

Source: How Proust Can Change Your Life

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

Alain de Botton

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

Alain de Botton

Source: On Love

“Must being in love always mean being in pain?”

Alain de Botton

Source: On Love

“We should add that it is a privilege to be the recipient of a sulk: it means the other person respects and trusts us enough to think we should understand their unspoken hurt. It is one of the odder gifts of love. Eventually”

Alain de Botton

Source: The Course of Love

“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, at the rare moments one can manage it, always love.”

Alain de Botton

Source: The Course of Love

“We are all more intelligent than we are capable, and awareness of the insanity of love has never saved anyone from the disease.”

Alain de Botton

Source: On Love

“To be shown love is to feel ourselves the object of concern: our presence is noted, our name is registered, our views are listened to, our failings are treated with indulgence and our needs are ministered to. And under such care, we flourish.”

Alain de Botton book Status Anxiety

Source: Status Anxiety

“It is perhaps sad books that best console us when we are sad, and to lonely service stations that we should drive when there is no one for us to hold or love.”

Alain de Botton

Source: The Art of Travel

“… love is a skill, not just an enthusiasm.”

Alain de Botton

Source: The Course of Love

“Endeavoring to purchase something we think beautiful may in fact be the most unimaginative way of dealing with the longing it excites in us, just as trying to sleep with someone may be the bluntest response to a feeling of love.”

Alain de Botton book The Architecture of Happiness

Source: The Architecture of Happiness

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

Alain de Botton

“If it is true that love is the pursuit in another of qualities we lack in ourselves, then in our love of someone from another culture, one ambition may be to weld ourselves more closely to values missing from our own culture.”

Alain de Botton

Source: The Art of Travel

“I left Symons’s company newly aware of the unthinking cruelty discreetly coiled within the magnanimous bourgeois assurance that everyone can discover happiness through work and love. It isn’t that these two entities are invariably incapable of delivering fulfilment, only that they almost never do so. And when an exception is represented as a rule, our individual misfortunes, instead of seeming to us quasi-inevitable aspects of life, will weigh down on us like particular curses. In denying the natural place reserved for longing and error in the human lot, the bourgeois ideology denies us the possibility of collective consolation for our fractious marriages and our unexploited ambitions, and condemns us instead to solitary feelings of shame and persecution for having stubbornly failed to become who we are.”

Alain de Botton

Source: The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (2009), p. 127-128.