Essays In Love Botton Quotes

Must being in love always mean being in pain?

As Proust once said, classically beautiful women should be left to men without imagination.

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

Unrequited love may be painful, but it is safely painful, because it does not involve inflicting damage on anyone but oneself, a private pain that is as bitter-sweet as it is self-induced. But as soon as love is reciprocated, one must be prepared to give up the passivity of simply being hurt to take on the responsibility of perpetrating hurt oneself.

In the end, I've found that it doesn't really matter who you marry. If you like them at the beginning, you probably won't like them at the end. And if you start off hating them, there's always the chance you'll end up thinking they're all right.

By forty, everyone has the face they deserve,’ wrote George Orwell,

Yet we can perhaps only ever fall in love without knowing quite who we have fallen in love with. The initial convulsion is necessarily founded on ignorance.

One has to go into relationships with equal expectations, ready to give as much as the other - not with one person wanting a fling and the other real love...

We fall in love because we long to escape from ourselves with someone as ideal as we are corrupt.

We charm by coincidence rather than design.

We would not love if there were no lack within us, but we are offended by the discovery of a similar lack in the other.

There is an Arabic saying that the soul travels at the pace of a camel. While most of us are led by the strict demands of timetables and diaries, our soul, the seat of the heart, trails nostalgically behind, burdened by the weight of memory. If every love affair adds a certain weight to the camel’s load, then we can expect the soul to slow according to the significance of love’s burden.

Albert Camus suggested that we fall in love with people because, from the outside, they look so whole, physically whole and emotionally ‘together’ – when subjectively, we feel dispersed and confused.

There is usually a Marxist moment in every relationship, the moment when it becomes clear that love is reciprocated. The way it is resolved depends on the balance between self-love and self-hatred. If self-hatred gains the upper hand, then the one who has received love will declare that the beloved (on some excuse or other) is not good enough for them (not good enough by virtue of associating with no-goods). But if self-love gains the upper hand, both partners may accept that seeing their love reciprocated is not proof of how low the beloved is, but of how lovable they have themselves turned out to be.

We start trying to be wise when we realize that we are not born knowing how to live, but that life is a skill that has to be acquired,

it seems impossible to talk of love and letting live, and if we are left to live, we are not usually loved.

Does beauty give birth to love? Or does love give birth to beauty? Did I love Chloe because she was beautiful? Or was she beautiful because I loved her?

A person is never good or bad per se, which means that loving or hating them necessarily has at its basis a subjective, and perhaps illusionistic, element.

A silence with an unattractive person implies they are the boring one, a silence with an attractive one leaves you certain it is you who are impossibly dull.

In the end, I’ve found that it doesn’t really matter who you marry. If you like them at the beginning, you probably won’t like them at the end. And if you start off hating them, there’s always the chance you’ll end up thinking they’re all right.

There is the old joke made by the Marx who laughed about not deigning to belong to a club that would accept someone like him as a member, a truth as appropriate in love as it is in club membership.

The beginning of revolutions is psychologically strikingly akin to that of certain relationships: the stress on unity, the sense of omnipotence, the desire to eliminate secrets (with the fear of the opposite soon leading to lover's paranoia and the creation of a secret police).

Expecting to find the answer, we find only the duplicate of our own problem.

Yet we can perhaps only ever fall in love without knowing quite who we have fallen in love with. The initial convulsion is necessarily founded on ignorance. Love or simple obsession?

Love reinvents our needs with unique speed. My impatience with the customs ritual indicated that Chloe, who I had not known existed a few hours ago, had already acquired the status of a craving. I felt I would die if I missed her outside – die for the sake of someone who had only entered my life at eleven thirty that morning.

But if the beginnings of love and amorous politics are equally rosy, then the ends are often equally bloody. We're familiar with political love that ends in tyranny, where a ruler's firm conviction that he has the true interests of his nation at heart ends up lending him the confidence to murder without qualms (and 'for their own good') all who disagree with him. Romantic lovers are similarly inclined to vent their frustration on dissenters and heretics.

Delusions are not harmful in themselves, they only hurt when one is alone in believing in them, when one cannot create an environment in which they can be sustained.

Because I have this thing about birthdays--they always remind me of death and forced jollity.

Though from a position of unrequited love they long to see their love returned, Marxists unconsciously prefer that their dreams remain in the realm of fantasy. Why should others think any better of them than they of themselves? Only so long as the loved one believes the Marxist to be more or less nothing, can the Marxist continue to believe the loved one to be more or less everything.

E surprinzător cât de des respingerea în dragoste este exprimată în limbajul moralității, limbajul aceea ce e corect și ce nu, a ceea ce e bun și ce e rău, ca și când a respinge sau a nu respinge, a iubi sau a nu iubi este ceva ce aparține în mod natural unei ramuri a eticii. E surprinzător cât de des cel care respinge este etichetat ca fiind rău, iar cel respins ajunge să întruchipeze binele.

The possibility of an alternative love story is a reminder that the life we are leading is only one of a myriad of possible lives and it is the impossibility of leading them all that plunges us into sadness.

history tells us of the case of a man living under the peculiar delusion that he was a fried egg. Quite how or when this idea had entered his head, no one knew, but he now refused to sit down anywhere for fear that he would ‘break himself’ and ‘spill the yolk’. His doctors tried sedatives and other drugs to appease his fears, but nothing seemed to work. Finally, one of them made the effort to enter the mind of the deluded patient and suggested that he should carry a piece of toast with him at all times, which he could place on any chair he wished to sit on, and thereby protect himself from breaking his yolk. From then on, the deluded man was never seen without a piece of toast handy, and was able to continue a more or less normal existence.

Silence and clumsiness could of course be taken as rather pitiful proof of desire. It being easy enough to seduce someone towards whom one feels indifferent, 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.

Long before we’ve had a chance to become truly familiar with our loved one, we may be filled with the curious sense that we know them already. It can seem as though we’ve met them somewhere before, in a previous life, perhaps, or in our dreams.

Doyurulmayı bekleyen gereksinimler kimi zaman halüsinasyonlar doğurur: Susuzluk suyu hayal eder, aşka duyulan gereksinim de ideal bir erkek ya da kadını.

One has to go into relationships with equal expectations, ready to give as much as the other

I suffer, therefore I am special. I am not understood, but for precisely that reason, I am worthy of greater understanding. 13.

There is usually a Marxist moment in every relationship, the moment when it becomes clear that love is reciprocated.

Two people who are surprised by a lion in a jungle clearing will – unless one of them is eaten – be effectively bonded by what they have seen.

One of love’s greatest drawbacks is that, for a while at least, it is in danger of making us seriously happy.

Therefore, in the mature account of love, we should never fall at first glance. We should reserve our leap until we have completed a clear-eyed investigation of the depths and nature of the waters. Only after we have undertaken a thorough exchange of opinions on parenting, politics, art, science, and appropriate snacks for the kitchen should two people ever decide they are ready to love each other.

Cele mai atrăgătoare femei nu sunt cele care ne dau voie să le sărutăm imediat (devenim repede nerecunoscători) și nici cele care nu ne lasă deloc să le sărutăm (le uităm repede), ci cele care ne duc de nas aceste extreme.

one cannot blame a lover for loving or not loving, for it is a matter beyond their choice and hence responsibility – though what makes rejection in love harder to bear than donkeys who can never sing is that one did once see the lover loving.

the only difference between the end of love and the end of life being that at least in the latter, we are granted the comforting thought that we will not feel anything after death. No such comfort for the lover, who knows that the end of the relationship will not necessarily be the end of love, and almost certainly not the end of life.

Rather than a tale of greed, the history of luxury could more accurately be read as a record of emotional trauma,” writes Alain de Botton in his book Status Anxiety, efficiently summing up Draper, Grey, and Trump in one blow. “It is the legacy of those who have felt pressured by the disdain of others to add an extraordinary amount to their bare selves in order to signal that they too may lay a claim to love.

The difference could be grouped into categories of mature and immature love. Preferable in almost every way, the philosophy of mature love is marked by an active awareness of the good and bad within each person, it is full of temperance, it resists idealization, it is free of jealousy, masochism, or obsession, it is a form of friendship with a sexual dimension, it is pleasant, peaceful, and reciprocated (and perhaps explains why most people who have known the wilder shores of desire would refuse its painlessness the title of love). Immature love on the other hand (though it has little to do with age) is a story of chaotic lurching between idealization and disappointment, an unstable state where feelings of ecstasy and beatitude combine with impressions of drowning and fatal nausea, where the sense that one has finally found the answer comes together with the feeling that one has never been so lost. The logical climax of immature (because absolute) love comes in death, symbolic or real. The climax of mature love comes in marriage, and the attempt to avoid death via routine (the Sunday papers, trouser presses, remote-controlled appliances). For immature love accepts no compromise, and once we refuse compromise, we are on the road to some kind of cataclysm. 6.

What lies behind this tendency to read things as part of a destiny? Perhaps only its opposite, the anxiety of contingency, the fear that the little sense there is in our lives is merely created by ourselves, that there is no scroll (and hence no preordained face awaiting) and that what may or may not be happening to us (whom we may or may not be meeting on airplanes) has no sense beyond what we choose to attribute to it - in short, the anxiety that there is no God to tell our story and hence assure our loves.

Moreover, for all the sacrifices demanded by the stoic life, was there not something cowardly within it? At the heart of stoicism lay the desire to disappoint oneself before someone else had the chance to do so. Stoicism was a crude defence against the dangers of the affections of others, a danger that it would take more endurance than a life in the desert to be able to face. In calling for a monastic existence free of emotional turmoil, stoicism was simply trying to deny the legitimacy of certain potentially painful yet fundamental human needs.

What does it mean that man is a ‘social animal’? Only that humans need one another in order to define themselves and achieve self-consciousness, in a way that molluscs or earthworms do not. We cannot come to a proper sense of ourselves if there aren’t others around to show us what we’re like. ‘A man can acquire anything in solitude except a character,’ wrote Stendhal, suggesting that character has its genesis in the reactions of others to our words and actions. Our selves are fluid and require the contours provided by our neighbours. To feel whole, we need people in the vicinity who know us as well, sometimes better, than we know ourselves. 4.

I read a heap of books to prepare to write my own. Valuable works about art crime include The Rescue Artist by Edward Dolnick, Master Thieves by Stephen Kurkjian, The Gardner Heist by Ulrich Boser, Possession by Erin Thompson, Crimes of the Art World by Thomas D. Bazley, Stealing Rembrandts by Anthony M. Amore and Tom Mashberg, Crime and the Art Market by Riah Pryor, The Art Stealers by Milton Esterow, Rogues in the Gallery by Hugh McLeave, Art Crime by John E. Conklin, The Art Crisis by Bonnie Burnham, Museum of the Missing by Simon Houpt, The History of Loot and Stolen Art from Antiquity Until the Present Day by Ivan Lindsay, Vanished Smile by R. A. Scotti, Priceless by Robert K. Wittman with John Shiffman, and Hot Art by Joshua Knelman. Books on aesthetic theory that were most helpful to me include The Power of Images by David Freedberg, Art as Experience by John Dewey, The Aesthetic Brain by Anjan Chatterjee, Pictures & Tears by James Elkins, Experiencing Art by Arthur P. Shimamura, How Art Works by Ellen Winner, The Art Instinct by Denis Dutton, and Collecting: An Unruly Passion by Werner Muensterberger. Other fascinating art-related reads include So Much Longing in So Little Space by Karl Ove Knausgaard, What Is Art? by Leo Tolstoy, History of Beauty edited by Umberto Eco, On Ugliness also edited by Umberto Eco, A Month in Siena by Hisham Matar, Art as Therapy by Alain de Botton and John Armstrong, Art by Clive Bell, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful by Edmund Burke, Seven Days in the Art World by Sarah Thornton, The Painted Word by Tom Wolfe, and Intentions by Oscar Wilde—which includes the essay “The Critic as Artist,” written in 1891, from which this book’s epigraph was lifted.

Când ne uităm la cineva (la un înger) din postura unei iubiri neîmpărtăşite şi ne imaginăm plăcerea de a fi în paradis alături de acea persoană, suntem tentaţi să trecem cu vederea un pericol important: cât de curând atracţia pe care o simţim ar păli dacă îngerul ar începe să răspundă iubirii noastre. Ne îndrăgostim pentru că tânjim să evadăm din noi înşine alături de cineva pe cât de frumos, inteligent şi spiritual pe atât suntem noi de urâţi, proşti şi plaţi. Dar dacă această făptură perfectă într-o zi ar decide să ne iubească la rândul său? Am fi întrucâtva şocaţi – cum să fie atât de minunată pe cât credeam, dacă are prostul gust de a agrea pe cineva ca mine? Dacă pentru a iubi trebuie să credem că fiinţa iubită ne e într-un fel superioară, nu apare un paradox crud atunci când ne împărtăşeşte dragostea? Ajungem să ne întrebăm: Dacă este atât de minunat /ă, cum se face că iubeşte pe cineva ca mine?

Consternarea pe care cunoaşterea aprofundată a iubitei ţi-o poate provoca este asemănătoare cu a compune în minte o simfonie minunată, pe care mai apoi s-o auzi cântată de o orchestră simfonică completă. Deşi suntem impresionaţi auzind atâtea din ideile noastre confirmate prin interpretare, nu putem să nu observăm lucruri mărunte care nu sunt aşa cum intenţionaserăm să fie. Nu cumva unul din violonişti este puţin disonant? Flautul nu intră cam târziu? Percuţia nu e cam tare? Oamenii pe care-i iubim la prima vedere sunt la fel de minunaţi ca simfonia compusă în minte. Le lipseşte gustul disonant în materie de pantofi sau de literatură, la fel cum simfonia neinterpretată este lipsită de viori disonante sau de flauturi care intră prea târziu. Dar imediat ce fantezia este cântată într-o sală de concert, fiinţele angelice care pluteau în conştiinţa noastră revin pe pământ şi se arată ca fiinţe materiale, încărcate de propria lor istorie mentală şi fizică (deseori incomodă) – aflăm că folosesc un anume fel de pastă de dinţi şi au un anume fel de a-şi tăia unghiile şi-l preferă pe Beethoven faţă de Bach şi creioanele faţă de stilouri.

It will take Rabih many years and frequent essays in love to reach a few different conclusions, to recognize that the very things he once considered romantic – wordless intuitions, instantaneous longings, a trust in soulmates – are what stand in the way of learning how to sustain relationships. He will conclude that love can endure only when one is unfaithful to its beguiling opening ambitions; and that for his relationships to work he will need to give up on the feelings that got him into them in the first place. He will need to learn that love is a skill rather than an enthusiasm.

According to this view, love is simply a direction, not a place, and burns itself out with the attainment of its goal, the possession (in bed or otherwise) of the loved one.

You’re not upset.’ ‘I am.’ ‘You deserve to be.

If in order to love, we must believe that the beloved surpasses us in some way, does not a cruel paradox emerge when we witness this love returned? ‘If s/he really is so wonderful, how could s/he could love someone like me?’ 2.

shoes are supreme symbols of aesthetic, and hence by extension psychological, compatibility. Certain areas and coverings of the body say more about a person than others: shoes suggest more than pullovers, thumbs more than elbows, underwear more than overcoats, ankles more than shoulders. 7.

Our hesitancy was a game, but a serious and useful one, which minimized offending an unwilling partner and eased a willing one more slowly into the prospect of mutual desire. The threat of the great ‘I like you’ could be softened by adding, ‘but not so much that I will let you know it directly . . .’ Chloe and I were politely sparing each other the need to pay the full price for a candid declaration of love. 14.

The most attractive are not those who allow us to kiss them at once (we soon feel ungrateful) or those who never allow us to kiss them (we soon forget them), but those who know how carefully to administer varied doses of hope and despair. 11.

I lost the ability to consider the question of predestination with necessary scepticism.

We can perhaps only ever fall in love without knowing quite who we have fallen in love with. Alain de Botton Essays in Love

Does beuty give birth to love? Or does love give birth to beauty? Did I love Chloe because she was beautiful? Or was she beautiful because I loved her?

O notorie inabilitate de a-și exprima emoțiile îl face pe om singurul animal capabil de sinucidere.

Romantic fatalism was no doubt a myth and an illusion, but that was no reason to dismiss it as nonsense. Myths may assume an importance that goes beyond their primary message, we don’t have to believe in Greek gods in order to know that they tell us something vital about the mind of man.

To speak of love after we had barely spent a morning together was to encounter charges of romantic delusion and semantic inaccuracy. Yet we can only ever fall in love without knowing who we have fallen in love with. The initial movement is necessarily founded on ignorance. So if I called it love in the face of so many doubts, both psychological and epistemological, it was perhaps out of a belief that the word could never be used accurately... As love was not a place, or colour, or chemical, but all there of these and more, or none of these and less, might not everyone speak and decide as they wished when it came to this province? Did this question not lie beyond the academic realm of true and false? Love or simple obsession? Who, if not time, - which was its own liar - could possibly begin to tell?

Chloe's holiday story was dull, but its dullness was no longer a criterion of judgment. I'd ceased to consider it according to the secular logic of ordinary conversations. I was no longer concerned to locate within its syntax either intellectual insight or poetic truth. 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 might choose to utter. I felt ready to follow her into every anecdote, I was ready to love every one of her jokes that had missed its punchline, every reflection that had lost its thread. (...) I felt ready to abandon self-absorption for the sake of total empathy, to follow Chloe into each of her possible selves, to catalog every one of her memories, to become a historian of her childhood, to learn of all her loves, fears and hatreds... everything that could possibly have played itself out within her mind and body had suddenly grown fascinating.

Time abbreviated itself, like an accordion that is lived in extension but remembered only in contraction.

From within love, we conceal the chance nature of our lives behind a purposive veil. We insist that the meeting with our redeemer, objectively haphazard and hence unlikely, has been prewritten in a scroll slowly unwinding in the sky. We invent a destiny to spare ourselves the anxiety that would arise from acknowledging that the little sense there is in our lives is merely created by ourselves, that there is no scroll (and hence no preordained fate awaiting) and that who we may or may not be meeting on aeroplanes has no sense beyond that we choose to attribute to it--in short, the anxiety that no one has written our story or assured our loves.

I kiss, therefore I do not think.

When we look at someone [an angel] from a position of unrequited love and imagine the pleasures that being in heaven with them might bring us, we are prone to overlook one important danger: how soon their attractions might pale if they began to love us back. We fall in love because we long to escape from ourselves with someone as beautiful, intelligent and witty as we are ugly, stupid and dull. But what if such a perfect being should one day turn around and decide they will love us back? We an only be somewhat shocked - how can they be as wonderful as we had hoped when they have the bad taste to approve of someone like us? If in order to love, we must believe that the beloved surpasses us in some way, does not a cruel paradox emerge when they return that love? We are led to ask, "If s/he really is so wonderful, how is it possible that s/he could love someone like me?

From within love, we conceal the chance nature of our lives behind a purposive veil. We insist that the meeting with our redeemer, objectively haphazard and hence unlikely, has been prewritten in a scroll slowly unwinding in the sky. We invent a destiny to spare ourselves the anxiety that would arise from acknowledging that the little sense there is in our lives is merely created by ourselves, that there is no scroll (and hence no preordained fate awaiting) and that who we may or may not be meeting on aeroplanes has no sense beyond that we choose to attribute to it--in short, the anxiety that no one has written our story or assured our loves