Essays in Love - Alain de Botton

"I think most people would throw their cynicism in the trash if they could, except that most never get the chance."

"Silence with an unattractive person implies that the person bores you. Silence with an attractive person makes you sure that you are the unbearably boring one."

"Silence and clumsiness can be forgiven as pathetic evidence of desire. Since it is so easy to seduce someone to whom one feels indifferent, the most clumsy seducers may generously be regarded as the most sincere."

"Most often we achieve our goals by coincidence rather than by planning - sad news for the seducer who is permeated by positivism and rationalism and who is convinced that through careful, almost scientific research he can discover the laws that make someone fall in love."

"Beauty gives birth to love or love gives birth to beauty?"

"To discover charm in unusual places is to refuse to be charmed by the obvious. It's easy enough to find charm in a pair of eyes or the outline of a beautiful mouth. It's much harder to detect it in the movements of a woman's hand on a supermarket counter."

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