James Mattison

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

“Children teach us that love is, in its purest form, a kind of service. The word has grown freighted with negative connotations. An individualist, self gratifying culture cannot easily equate contentment with being at someone else’s call. ... we learn, too, that being another’s servant is not humiliating - quite the opposite, for it sets us free from the wearying responsibility of continuously catering to our own twisted, insatiable natures. We learn the relief and privilege of being granted something more important to live for than ourselves.”
― Alain de Botton, The Course of Love

“We usually believe gossip about ourselves to have been inspired by a level of malice far greater (or more critical) than the malice we ourselves felt in relation to the last person we gossiped about, a person whose habits we could mock without this in any way altering our affection for them.”
― 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