15 Alain De Botton Quotes That Will Make You Believe In Soulmates Again

"Love stories begin not when we fear someone may be unwilling to see us again but when they decide they would have no objection to seeing us all the time."

Marisa DonnellyDecember 14, 2016

15 Alain De Botton Quotes That Will Make You Believe In Soulmates Again

— Alain de Botton, The Course of Love: A Novel

A marriage doesn't begin with a proposal, or even an initial meeting. It begins far earlier, when the idea of love is born, and more specifically the dream of a soulmate.

— Alain de Botton, The Course of Love: A Novel

Rather than some notional idea of perfect complementarity, it is the capacity to tolerate dissimilarity that is the true marker of the 'right' person.

— Alain de Botton, The Course of Love: A Novel

What we typically call love is only the start of love.

— Alain de Botton, The Course of Love: A Novel

— Alain de Botton, The Course of Love: A Novel

We allow our love stories to end way too early. We seem to know far too much about how love starts, and recklessly little about how it might continue.

— Alain de Botton, The Course of Love: A Novel

Love means admiration for qualities in the lover that promise to correct our weaknesses and imbalances; love is a search for completion.

— Alain de Botton, The Course of Love: A Novel

Love is also, and equally, about weakness, about being touched by another's fragilities and sorrows, especially when--as happens in the early days--we ourselves are in no danger of being held responsible for them.

— Alain de Botton, The Course of Love: A Novel

— Alain de Botton, The Course of Love: A Novel

Love is dividend of gratitude for our lover's insight into our own confused and troubled psyche.

— Alain de Botton, The Course of Love: A Novel

There is, in the early period of love where...we can be childish, imaginative, wild, hopeful, cynical, fragile, and multiple; all of this our lover can understand and accept us for.

— Alain de Botton, The Course of Love: A Novel

Marriage: a hopeful, generous, infinitely kind gamble taken by two people who don't know yet who they are or who the other might be, binding themselves to a future they cannot conceive of and have carefully omitted to investigate.

— Alain de Botton, The Course of Love: A Novel

When two people belong together, there is simply--at long last--a wondrous reciprocal feeling that both parties see the world in precisely the same way.

— Alain de Botton, The Course of Love: A Novel

We don't need to be constantly reasonable in order to have good relationships; all we need to have mastered is the occasional capacity to acknowledge with good grace that we may, in one or two areas, be somewhat insane.

— Alain de Botton, The Course of Love: A Novel

We believe we are seeking happiness in love, but we are really after is familiarity.

— Alain de Botton, The Course of Love: A Novel

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