Alain de Botton

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.

how closely love is bound up with a feeling of the necessity and uniqueness of the beloved.

a destiny to love a given person.

Seeing through people is so easy, and it gets you nowhere,” remarked Elias Canetti, suggesting how effortlessly and yet how uselessly we can find fault with others

Philosophy had supplied Socrates with convictions in which he had been able to have rational, as opposed to hysterical, confidence when faced with disapproval.

In Socrates’ life and death lay an invitation to intelligent scepticism.

None of which would have seemed remarkable to the contemporaries of Socrates. They would have been confounded and angered to be asked exactly why they sacrificed cocks to Asclepius or why men needed to kill to be virtuous. It would have appeared as obtuse as wondering why spring followed winter or why ice was cold.

Aristophanes was articulating a familiar criticism of intellectuals: that through their questions they drift further from sensible views than those who have never ventured to analyse matters in a systematic way. Dividing the playwright and the philosopher was a contrasting assessment of the adequacy of ordinary explanations. Whereas sane people could in Aristophanes’ eyes rest in the knowledge that fleas jumped far given their size and that gnats made a noise from somewhere, Socrates stood accused of a manic suspicion of common sense and of harbouring a perverse hunger for complicated, inane alternatives.

There may be no good reason for things to be the way they are.

The value of criticism will depend on the thought processes of critics, not on their number or rank: