I was introduced to Alain de Botton’s work through a friend.

Last week, I started reading his novel Essays in Love, and boy, am I stunned!

De Botton writes with ease about love and relationships. He tells us everything we need to know about having a crush on someone and all its implications.

Love is a complicated topic, which most of us find hard to comprehend. And we might never fully comprehend it, but we can at least learn a thing or two about it.

Folks, here are 11 quotes from Alain de Botton that will shatter all your assumptions about love.

“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.”

“Until one is close to death, it must be difficult to declare anyone as the love of one’s life.”

“Do we not fall in love partly out of a momentary will to suspend seeing through people, even at the cost of blinding ourselves a little in the process? If cynicism and love lie at opposite ends of a spectrum, do we not sometimes fall in love in order to escape the deliberating cynicism to which we are prone?”

“What is so frightening is the extent to which we may idolize others when we have such trouble tolerating ourselves.”

“Every fall into love involves the triumph of hope over self-knowledge. We fall in love hoping we won’t find in another what we know is in ourselves, all the cowardice, weakness, laziness, dishonesty, compromise, and stupidity. We throw a cordon of love around the chosen one and decide that everything within it will somehow be free of our faults.”

“If you asked most people whether they believed in love or not, they’d probably say they didn’t. Yet that’s not necessarily what they truly think. It’s just the way they defend themselves against what they want. They believe in it but pretend they don’t until they’re allowed to. Most people would throw away all their cynicism if they could. The majority just never gets the chance.”

“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.”

“The telephone becomes an instrument of torture in the demonic hands of a beloved who doesn’t call.”

“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.”

“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 bittersweet as it is self-induced.”

“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.”

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