It is better to be unhappy in love than unhappy in marriage, but some people manage to be both.

Why does one love? How queer it is to see only one being in the world, to have only one thought in one's mind, only one desire in the heart, and only one name on the lips--a name which comes up continually, rising, like the water in a spring, from the depths of the soul to the lips, a name which one repeats over and over again, which one whispers ceaselessly, everywhere, like a prayer.

There is only one good thing in life, and that is love. And how you misunderstand it! how you spoil it! You treat it as something solemn like a sacrament, or something to be bought, like a dress.

Savo širdyje ji pyko ant Žiuljeno, kad jis to nesupranta, kad visai neturi to subtilaus drovumo, to instinktyvaus delikatumo; ir ji pajuto tarp savęs ir jo tarsi uždangą, tarsi kažkokią kliūtį, pirmą kartą pastebėjusi, kad du žmonės niekada negali prasiskverbti iki vienas kito sielos, iki minčių gelmių, kad jie gali eiti šalia vienas kito, kartais apsikabinę, bet ne susilieję, ir kad dvasinė mūsų esmė visą gyvenimą klaidžioja vieniša.

There were some children round him playing in the dust on the paths. They had long fair hair, and with very earnest faces and solemn attention were making little mountains of sand so as to stamp on them and squash them underfoot.
Pierre was going through one of those gloomy days when one looks into every corner of one's soul and shakes out every crease.
'Our occupations are like the work of those kids,' he thought. Then he wondered whether after all the wisest course in life was not to beget two or three of these little useless beings and watch them grow with complacent curiosity. And he was touched by the desire to marry. You aren't so lost when you're not alone any more. At any rate you can hear somebody moving near you in times of worry and uncertainty, and it is something anyway to be able to say words of love to a woman when you are feeling down.
He began thinking about women.
His knowledge of them was very limited, as all he had had in the Latin Quarter was affairs of a fortnight or so, dropped when the month's money ran out and picked up again or replaced the following month. Yet kind, gentle, consoling creatures must exist. Hadn't his own mother brought sweet reasonableness and charm to his father's home? How he would have loved to meet a woman, a real woman!
He leaped up, determined to go and pay a little visit to Mme Rosémilly.
But he quickly sat down again. No, he didn't like that one!

I reason everything out, and usually analyze my tastes too well to succumb to them blindly. And that's my chief defect, the real cause of my weakness. But this woman has taken possession of me in spite of myself, in spite of my fear and my knowledge of her; and she possesses me as if she had plucked out, one after the other, my every last aspiration.