Alain de Botton

Travel is a lot like love. ”

To a shameful extent, the charm of marriage boils down to how unpleasant it is to be alone. ”

Parent and child may both love, but - unbeknown to the child - each party is on a different end of the axis. This is why, in adulthood, when we first long for 'love', what we mean is that we want to 'be loved' as we were once loved by a parent. ”

Used to do a lot of falling in love with people, almost in the street, and imagining that there would be no obstacle to a happy love story other than finding the 'right person'. ”

I don't want to say that our expectations of love are too high; it's just that if we're to meet them, we have to become a little more self-aware. ”

If you're understood in maybe, I don't know, 60% of your soul by your partner, that's fantastic. Don't expect that it's going to be 100%. Of course you will be lonely. ”

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

In the early days of love sometimes, you will report an ecstatic feeling you have met someone who seems to understand you without you needing to speak. ”

I think a certain degree of pessimism is actually helpful to love. ”

Many of our ideas of what love is comes from stories... these are extremely powerful shapers of our attitudes towards love, and I think that, in some ways, often we've got the wrong story. ”