Although nearly everyone "fails at love" at some point, few have failed as spectacularly as the great philosophers.

We revere the wisdom of these storied figures, but history is littered with their poor romantic choices. If only they had taken their own advice!

Andrew Shaffer's Great Philosophers Who Failed at Love (Harper Perennial, 2011) paints brief but entertaining portraits of great thinkers whose words we repeat – but whose decisions we should avoid at all costs.

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Great Philosophers Who Failed at Love collects wisdom from the lives, loves, and losses of history's greatest thinkers, including Peter Abelard, Louis Althusser, St. Thomas Aquinas, Aristotle, St. Augustine Of Hippo, Simone de Beauvoir, Henry Ward Beecher, John Calvin, Albert Camus, Nicolas Chamfort, Auguste Comte, Rene Descartes, John Dewey, Denis Diderot, Diogenes the Cynic, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Friedrich Engels, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Martin Heidegger, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Soren Kierkegaard, John Locke, Titus Lucretius, Friedrich Nietzsche, Plato, Ayn Rand, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre, Arthur Schopenhauer, Seneca the Younger, Socrates, Emanuel Swedenborg, Henry David Thoreau, and Leo Tolstoy.