James Mattison

“A picture’s beauty does not depend on the things portrayed in it.”
― Alain de Botton, How Proust Can Change Your Life

“Certainly travelers had returned from the heart and tried to represent what they had seen, but love was in the end like a species of rare colored butterfly, often sighted, but rarely conclusively identified.”
― Alain de Botton, On Love

“To make [reading] into a discipline is to give too large a role to what is only an incitement. Reading is on the threshold of the spiritual life; it can introduce us to it: it does not constitute it.”
― Alain de Botton, How Proust Can Change Your Life

“Afraid of losing her, we forget all the others. Sure of keeping her, we compare her with those others whom at once we prefer to her.”
― Alain de Botton, How Proust Can Change Your Life