No one properly gets, or can fully sympathize with, anyone else. - Alain de Botton

It is perhaps when our lives are at their most problematic that we are likely to be most receptive to beautiful things.

If cynicism and love lie at opposite ends of a spectrum, do we not sometimes fall in love in order to escape the debilitating cynicism to which we are prone? Is there not in every coup de foudre a certain willful exaggeration of the qualities of the beloved, an exaggeration which distracts us from our habitual pessimism and focuses our energies on someone in whom we can believe in a way we have never believed in ourselves?

There may be significant things to learn about people by looking at what annoys them most.