Caroline Mikolajczyk

“For a start, we should recognise that the idea of being deeply in love with one special partner over a whole lifetime, what we can call Romantic love, is a very new, ambitious and odd concept, which is at best 250 years old. Before then, people lived together of course but without any very high expectations of being blissfully content doing so. It was a purely practical arrangement, entered into for the sake of survival and the children. We should recognise the sheer historical strangeness of the idea of happy coupledom. A good Romantic marriage is evidently theoretically possible, but it may also be extremely unlikely, something only some 5 or 10 per cent of us can ever properly succeed at – which should make any failure feel a good deal less shameful. As a society, we’ve made something normal that’s in fact a profound anomaly. It is as though we’d set up high altitude tight rope walking as a popular sport. No wonder most of us fall off – and might not want to, or be able to, face getting back on.”
― Alain de Botton

“The clue to dieting: ensuring (not always easy) one has more exciting things to do than eat.”
― Alain de Botton

“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.”
― Alain de Botton, Essays In Love

“How should we deal with crushes? A crush… Enjoy it. I mean…what is a crush? A crush is a sudden encounter with perfection in another human being. You glimpse a face in the library or the train, behind the burger stand and you think there could be nothing wrong with this person. There is a delicacy, a kindness and a depth of this person’s eyes, that just it betokens a perfect human being. Enjoy that. But please don’t believe it’s true. The best cure for love, as we know, is knowledge. Get to know them better. And part of the problem of unrequited love, you know the reason why you are in love with somebody and you got a few dates and then they say I can never see you again and they run away…why is that cruel? Ultimately that it’s cruel because you’ve denied the person a sense of what you’re really like, when you’re doing the washing up and when life’s got a bit banal etc…You’ve prevented them from seeing aspects of you which would have stopped them being so passionately in love with you. So that’s a very cruel thing to do. So greater knowledge, greater imagination, but let’s enjoy it. Why not? Life is short. Enjoy the crush.”
― Alain de Botton