Imogen Eden > Imogen's Quotes

“You are moving out of the realm of fantasy "when I grow up" and adjusting to the reality that you're there; it's happening”
― Dolly Alderton, Everything I Know About Love

“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. We locate inside another a perfection that eludes us within ourselves, and through our union with the beloved hope to maintain (against the evidence of all self-knowledge) a precarious faith in our species.”
― Alain de Botton, On Love

“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, On Love

“To be loved by someone is to realize how much they share the same needs that lie at the heart of our own attraction to them. 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. 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. Expecting to find the answer, we find only the duplicate of our own problem.”
― Alain de Botton, On Love

“The more familiar two people become, the more the language they speak together departs from that of the ordinary, dictionary-defined discourse. Familiarity creates a new language, an in-house language of intimacy that carries reference to the story the two lovers are weaving together and that cannot be readily understood by others.”
― Alain de Botton, On Love

“Perhaps the easiest people to fall in love with are those about whom
we know nothing. Romances are never as pure as those we imagine during
long train journeys, as we secretly contemplate a beautiful person who is
gazing out of the window – a perfect love story interrupted only when the
beloved looks back into the carriage and starts up a dull conversation
about the excessive price of the on-board sandwiches with a neighbour or
blows her nose aggressively into a handkerchief.”
― Alain de Botton, On Love

“Must being in love always mean being in pain?”
― Alain de Botton, On Love

“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 coyly lead us between the two extremes.”
― Alain de Botton, On Love

“The telephone becomes an instrument of torture in the demonic hands of a beloved who doesn't call.”
― Alain de Botton, On Love

“What is so frightening is the extent to which we may idealize others when we have such trouble tolerating ourselves”
― Alain de Botton, Essays In Love

“Her lie was symptomatic of a certain pride she took in mocking the romantic, in being unsentimental, matter-of-fact, stoic; yet at heart she was the opposite: idealistic, dreamy, giving, and deeply attached to everything she liked verbally to dismiss as "mushy.”
― Alain de Botton, On Love

“The inability to live in the present lies in the fear of leaving the sheltered position of anticipation or memory, and so of admitting that this is the only life that one is ever likely (heavenly intervention aside) to live.”
― Alain de Botton, On Love

“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.”
― Alain de Botton, Essays In Love

“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...”
― Alain de Botton, Essays In Love

“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.”
― Alain de Botton, On Love

“It seemed impossible, from within love at least, that this could have been anything but fate. It would have taken a steady mind to contemplate without superstition the enormous probability of a meeting that had turned out to alter our lives. Someone at (30,000 feet) must have been pulling strings in the sky.”
― Alain de Botton, On Love

“We fall in love because we long to escape from ourselves with someone as ideal as we are corrupt.”
― Alain de Botton, Essays In Love

“Love is a decision, it is a judgment, it is a promise. If love were only a feeling, there would be no basis for the promise to love each other forever. A feeling comes and it may go. How can I judge that it will stay forever, when my act does not involve judgment and decision.”
― Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving

“Love isn't something natural. Rather it requires discipline, concentration, patience, faith, and the overcoming of narcissism. It isn't a feeling, it is a practice.”
― Fromm, Eric, The Art of Loving

“I'm not upset that you lied to me, I'm upset that from now on I can't believe you.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Sometimes people don't want to hear the truth because they don't want their illusions destroyed.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche