How Ready Are You For Love? Quotes

“We don't have to doubt that there are indeed people whose faces and surface manner imply all manner of enchanting qualities. But we begin to take our first steps towards emotional maturity when we finally accept (with deep sorrow) that, appearances notwithstanding, everyone is - ultimately - profoundly peculiar and, to put it in a colloquial way, mad: distrubed by their childhoods, unable to understand themselves, inclined to error and perversity and in complicated ways serious trouble to be around.”
― The School of Life, How Ready Are You For Love?: A path to more fulfilling and joyful relationships

“The effective way to please people is not to people-please but to take the risk of behaving in a real way around them, which might well involve a few tantrums - something that which we should ultimately be reassured by and feel grateful to be on the receiving end of.”
― The School of Life, How Ready Are You For Love?: A path to more fulfilling and joyful relationships

“We will at points be tricky to live with, we will never add self-righteousness and defensiveness to our list of flaws.

The easiest people to live with turn out to be those with the keenest awareness that they might not be any such thing.”
― The School of Life, How Ready Are You For Love?: A path to more fulfilling and joyful relationships

“An affair is a destructive and inarticulate response to a feeling of disappointment.”
― The School of Life, How Ready Are You For Love?: A path to more fulfilling and joyful relationships

“So called soppiness is not just fragility; it is emblematic of a capacity for soft-heartedness that is required to sweeten the angry and anxious moments of a long-term life with anyone. Someone who knows how to cry at a bad film will probably also be someone who looks after us when we are ill, who sensitively cares about the teras of a child and who would not dismiss us as a loser if we failed.”
― The School of Life, How Ready Are You For Love?: A path to more fulfilling and joyful relationships

“As pschologists will point out, what dooms couples isn't that they argue; it's that they don't know how to make up.”
― The School of Life, How Ready Are You For Love?: A path to more fulfilling and joyful relationships

“The only way to ensure that complaints don't become grounds for a break-up is to take care that they regularly express themselves as arguments, with raised voices and thunder if necessary. We should, wihtout guilt or reserve, have regular cause to call our partner selfish, to accuse them of missing the point, to point out stupidities and errors - and to have equal accusations thrown back at us.”
― The School of Life, How Ready Are You For Love?: A path to more fulfilling and joyful relationships

“Those who are especially good at arguing in life may fail to appreciate a key distinction in relationships: we can either be right, or we can love. Successful lovers know how much they may need to 'lose' in arguments in order to win at love.”
― The School of Life, How Ready Are You For Love?: A path to more fulfilling and joyful relationships

“The advantage of sex is that it cannot occur without a high degree of vulnerability on both sides. The physical act requires an almost unavoidable degree of physical and emotional intimacy - which explains why sex can be so difficult between two people who lack trust or are nursing tensions and resentments.”
― The School of Life, How Ready Are You For Love?: A path to more fulfilling and joyful relationships

“Anyone can be polite and good. The vaulable achievement is to learn how to be different, authentic and 'bad' - that is, to allow ourselves to be known.”
― The School of Life, How Ready Are You For Love?: A path to more fulfilling and joyful relationships

“We shouldn't be reassured, either, when a partner insists that they have no interst whatsoever in any other human on earth. We should wonder what they are opting not to tell us about and why - and feel sad that we haven't as yet established a sufficient atmosphere of trust for the beautiful peculiarities of the sexual mind to be safely explored.”
― The School of Life, How Ready Are You For Love?: A path to more fulfilling and joyful relationships

“We tend to focus overly on the externals: a certain sort of room, particular kinds of clothes, a certain level of hormones... But the most important ingredient in encouraging us to take off our clothes and present ourselves without inhibition or fear is - in the end - trust. Trust that a partner has our best interests at heart, that we aren't ever going to be mocked, that there is loyalty and long-term concern at play, that we are with someone who can be delicate with our feelings. Sex itself may be rough and powerful; the feelings behind sex must be anything but”
― The School of Life, How Ready Are You For Love?: A path to more fulfilling and joyful relationships

“One of the greatest sources of difficulty in relationships stems paradoxically from the strength of a person's wish not be 'difficult”
― The School of Life, How Ready Are You For Love?: A path to more fulfilling and joyful relationships

“Before we ask someone to love us, we and they deserve to get a clearer map of the territory we imagine we will be in. We need to know what we think happens to lovers in general. Those who expect disaster tend to find it, or have a good shot at trying to create it.”
― The School of Life, How Ready Are You For Love?: A path to more fulfilling and joyful relationships

“If we were to realise the perilous situation we were in on account of our childhoods, we might exercise extreme vigilance around people we were insitinctively attracted to. We might assume that almost anyone we felt mysteriously and powerfully drawn to would probably turn out to be wrong. We might learn to resist falling in love at first sight- and would be just as careful about swiftly falling into hatred. We would undestand that we needed to fight our insticts at every turn, because of how badly our pasts have corrupted them.”
― The School of Life, How Ready Are You For Love?: A path to more fulfilling and joyful relationships

“When we laugh at a critique, it's a sign that we have understood the critique, that we have acknowledged areas of absurdity and are in the background pleased that someone cares about us enough to bother with our education.”
― The School of Life, How Ready Are You For Love?: A path to more fulfilling and joyful relationships

“We don't fortunately need those we love to be sane (or we would be forever alone). We merely need them to be able in their calmer moments - to admit to their strangeness with a degree of grace and good humour. They would ideally be able to tell us, before they have hurt us too badly, some of what is likely to be most difficult about living close to them. They will warn us about their bad moods after work, their awkwardness around their mother or their tendency to panic at airports. Their confessions won't magically remove every problem, but they will hugely attenuate their impact. We are infinitely more likely to forgive someone who has a good sense of what they need to be forgiven for than someone who maintains their innocence against all odds.”
― The School of Life, How Ready Are You For Love?: A path to more fulfilling and joyful relationships

“Liberation awaits us when we are able to seperate out present friction from early tragedy. The people we attempt to ask out for dinner are not - in reality - the figures from yesterday on whom we depended and who let us down when we had few other options. We don't need to take their verdict as anything other than a straightforward declaration of unavailablity from which we need to draw no grand conclusions as to our significance as human beings. We will scatter our invitations as widely and as innocently as we must when we growable to accept that sometimes a 'no' may just be a 'no”
― The School of Life, How Ready Are You For Love?: A path to more fulfilling and joyful relationships