James Mattison

“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

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

“... the only difference between the end of love and the end of life being that at least in the latter, we are granted the comforting thought that we will not feel anything after death. No such comfort for the lover, who knows that the end of the relationship will not necessarily be the end of love, and most certainly not the end of life.”
― 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