Alain De Botton

Charting the progress of an affair, from first kiss to argument and reconciliation, from intimacy and tenderness to anxiety, this is a wholly modern attempt to define the age-old dilemmas of the heart by detailing the highs and lows of contemporary romance.

Essays in Love

Jessica Hsu

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.

Most people do not openly force us into roles, they merely suggest that we adopt them through their reactions to us, and hence surreptitiously prevent us from moving beyond whatever mould they have assigned us.

A subjective theory of beauty makes the observer wonderfully indispensable.

Jaden Nelson

The best way I can describe it is a hyper-examination of love and what it means, the process of meeting someone and falling in love and possibly falling out of love. It was beautifully written, had great and artistic metaphors, and beautiful insights on the art of loving someone. Some notes from the audiobook: 
- The word love can not describe that which we feel sometimes, which is why we may have doubts as to what exactly it is we are feeling. 
- In the wrong hands, intimate words and moments given to someone with the promise of secrecy can be converted to a common currency, a rumor to be spread.
- I loved her body for the promise of who she was
- We may be under the illusion we call love, but if we can find someone that is under the same illusion, we create a happy symbiosis.
- Lovers depart from the regular language and nature of conversation in their discourse, instead basing it on the story that they are weaving together
- we call ourselves the same names although we are like trees and change with the seasons. We couldn't have a new name for a tree for every season and in the same way we do not change our names even though the person we are now may be unrecognizable from who we were just a few weeks ago. 
- Chloe and I acknowledge that love's light doesn't always burn with the same furiosity. It is ok to not like your lover so much today and like them a little more later. Most of our issues with our lovers are just merely us projecting what has happened at the office.
Great little book

as a seventeen year old girl who is just now experiencing romantic love for the first time ever, this book really helped me understand the way relationships work and my psyche and the psyche of the boy i like and it was just a really educative and informative book which somehow still managed to keep from being plotless and boring while teaching important lessons… i especially loved the concept of mixing the novelistic elements with those of essays and theory :)

jana 

"Because in resolving our need to love, we do not always succeed in resolving our need to long." 

"However brave, the stoic was in the end a coward at the point of perhaps the highest reality, at the moment of love." 

Jacqueline Kim

Timeless romance 

"Because in resolving our need to love, we do not always succeed in resolving our need to long." 

"However brave, the stoic was in the end a coward at the point of perhaps the highest reality, at the moment of 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.A man and a woman meet over casual conversation on a flight from Paris to London, and so begins a love story - from first kiss to first argument, elation to heartbreak, and everything in between. Each stage of the relationship is illuminated with startling clarity, as de Botton explores emotions often felt but rarely understood.With the verve of a novelist and the insight of a philosopher, Alain de Botton uncovers the mysteries of the human heart. Essays In Love is an iconic book - one that should be read by anyone who has ever fallen in love.PRAISE FOR ALAIN DE BOTTON'The book's success has much to do with its beautifully modelled sentences, its wry humour and its unwavering deadpan respect for its reader's intelligence . . . full of keen observation and flashes of genuine lyricism, acuity and depth.' Francine Prose, New Republic 'Witty, funny, sophisticated, neatly tied up, and full of wise and illuminating insights.' P. J. Kavanagh, Spectator 'De Botton is a national treasure.' Susan Hill 'I doubt if de Botton has written a dull sentence in his life.' Jan Morris, New Statesman 'Single-handedly, de Botton has taken philosophy back to its simplest and most important purpose: helping us to live our lives.' Independent

Georgia Carr

This was such an interesting book. Alain de Botton is an absolute dream of an author, I am certain. The mix between philosophical essay and fictional prose was such a great way to tell the tale of Chloe and the narrator's relationship. As always, de Botton makes me think about relationships and about love in a whole new light.

"Essays in Love will appeal to anyone who has ever been in a relationship or confused about love. The book charts the progress of a love affair from the first kiss to argument and reconciliation, from intimacy and tenderness to the onset of anxiety and heartbreak. The work's genius lies in the way it minutely analyses emotions we've all felt before but have perhaps never understood so well: it includes a chapter on the anxieties of when and how to say 'I love you' and another on the challenges of disagreeing with someone else's taste in shoes. While gripping the reader with the talent of a great novelist, de Botton brings a philosopher's sensibility to his analyses of the emotions of love, resulting in a genre-breaking book that is at once touching and thought-provoking."--Publisher's website.

Xiang

Nika Khoshdel

Richard Palmer

Alain de Botton

The bestselling author of The Architecture of Happiness and How Proust Can Change Your Life revisits his utterly charming debut book, Essays in Love. The narrator is smitten by Chloe on a Paris-to-London flight, and by the time they’ve reached the luggage carousel he knows he is in love. He loves her chestnut hair, watery green eyes, the gap that makes her teeth Kantian and not Platonic, and her views on Heidegger’s Being and Time — but he hates her taste in shoes. What makes this book extraordinary is the depth with which the emotions involved in the relationship are analysed. Love comes under the philosophical microscope. Plotting the course of their affair from the initial delirium of infatuation to the depths of suicidal despair, through a fit of anhedonia — defined in medical texts as a disease resulting from the terror brought on by the threat of utter happiness — and finally through the terrorist tactics employed when the beloved begins, inexplicably, to drift away, Essays in Love is filled with profound and witty observations on the pain and exhilaration of love. An entire chapter is devoted to the nuances and subtexts of an initial date, while another chapter mulls over the question of how and when to say “I love you.” With allusions to Aristotle, Sartre, Wittgenstein, and Groucho Marx, de Botton has plotted an imaginative and microscopically detailed romance.

Emma Bose

Ned Summers 

Farah Aisha Shabrina

chess

Katarina

Stan D

Ioana Kardos

Félix

'De Botton is a national treasure.' - Susan Hill, author of The Woman in Black With an introduction by Sheila Heti A unique love story and a classic work of philosophy, rooted in the mysterious workings of the human heart and mind. 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. A man and a woman meet over casual conversation on a flight from Paris to London, and so begins a love story - from first kiss to first argument, elation to heartbreak, and everything in between. Each stage of the relationship is illuminated with startling clarity, as de Botton explores emotions often felt but rarely understood. With the verve of a novelist and the insight of a philosopher, Alain de Botton uncovers the mysteries of the human heart. Essays In Love is an iconic book - one that should be read by anyone who has ever fallen in love.

Picador Classic

Essays In Love

Wenny

Vivian

Capucine Fachot

Alex Gee

cotarded

Beste Akkaya

Moray Lyle McIntosh

Debut novel of contemporary romance, blending philosophical discourse with the mundane bathos of daily life.

Essays in Love

Reviews

Highlights