"The Course of Love" Quotes

We expect happiness to be a natural condition, but it is precisely because we are ordinarily happy that its pursuit seems so frustratingly elusive.

We fall in love hoping that we will not find in the other 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.

Love is a skill rather than an enthusiasm.

We are ready to believe that we are the exception and that perfection awaits us if only we can find the right person.

It is a risk to love. What if it doesn’t work out? Ah, but what if it does.

In a good enough partnership, people have to learn to tolerate each other's unreasonable expectations.

Love is a painful, poignant, touching attempt by two flawed individuals to try and meet each other's needs in situations of gross uncertainty and ignorance about who they are and who the other person is.

Choosing whom to commit ourselves to is merely a case of identifying which particular variety of suffering we would most like to sacrifice ourselves for.

We don’t need to be constantly reasonable in order to have good relationships; all we need to have mastered is the occasional capacity to acknowledge with good grace that we may, in one or two areas, be somewhat insane.

We only fall in love with strangers.