Love is a striking example of how little reality means to us.
My destination is no longer a place, rather a new way of seeing.
One says the things which one feels the need to say, and which the other will not understand: one speaks for oneself alone.
We don’t receive wisdom we must discover it for ourselves.
… Error, by force of contrast, enhances the triumph of Truth…
When one feels oneself smitten by love for a woman, one ought to say to oneself, “What are her surroundings? What has been her life? All one’s future happiness lies in the answer.
Do not wait for life. Do not long for it. Be aware, always and at every moment, that the miracle is in the here and now.
… there was no need for him to hasten towards the attainment of a happiness already captured and held in a safe place, which would not escape his grasp again.
Much that for us is fraught with with happiness or misery, remains almost unnoticed by the rest of the world.
… the idea that ‘Life’ contains situations more interesting and more romantic than all the romances ever written.
It is not because other people are dead that our affection for them grows faint, it is because we ourselves are dying.
For every death is a simplification of existence for the others, removes the necessity to show gratitude, the obligation to pay visits.
Every reader finds himself. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.
A work in which there are theories is like an object which still has its price-tag on.
But,instead of what our imagination makes us suppose and which we worthless try to discover,life gives us something that we could hardly imagine.
Everything that seems imperishable tends to extinguishment.
The time which we have at our disposal every day is elastic; the passions that we feel expand it, those that we inspire contract it; and habit fills up what remains.
The creation of the world did not occur at the beginning of time, it occurs every day.
Reading is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.
There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we believe we left without having lived them, those we spent with a favorite book.
On no days of our childhood did we live so fully perhaps as those we thought we had left behind without living them, those that we spent with a favourite book.
No days, perhaps, of all our childhood are ever so fully lived are those that we had regarded as not being lived at all: days spent wholly with a favourite book.
A book is no mere book anymore than man can be mere man. A book was like an individual man, unmatched and with no cause of existence beyond himself.
This book of mine has not been manufactured: it has been garnered.
Let us leave pretty women to men with no imagination.
With women who do not love us, as with the “dear departed,” the knowledge that there is no hope left does not prevent us from continuing to wait.
I was not one man only but the steady advance hour after hour of an army in close formation, in which there appeared, according to the moment, impassioned men, indifferent men, jealous men.
For even if we have the sensation of being always surrounded by our own soul, it is not as though by a motionless prison: rather, we are in some sense borne along with it in a perpetual leap to go beyond it.
Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself.
Why did you not forget your heart also? I should never have let you have that back.” …
After a certain age, and even if we develop in quite different ways, the more we become ourselves, the more our family traits are accentuated.
Having a body is in itself the greatest threat to the mind… The body encloses the mind in a fortress; before long the mind is besieged on all sides, and in the end the mind has to give itself up.
Every woman feels that the greater her power over a man, the more impossible it is to leave him except by sudden flight: a fugitive precisely because a queen.
… the courage of one’s opinions is always a form of calculating cowardice in the eyes of the ‘other side’…
To such an extent does passion manifest itself in us as a temporary and distinct character, which not only takes the place of our normal character but actually obliterates the signs by which that character has hitherto been discernible.
Bodily passion, which has been so unjustly decried, compels its victims to display every vestige that is in them of unselfishness and generosity, and so effectively that they shine resplendent in the eyes of all beholders.
But I consoled myself with the reflexion that in spite of everything she was for me the real point of intersection between reality and dream.
So difficult is it for us to know, with the dead as with the living, whether a thing would cause them joy or sorrow!
She was capable of causing me pain, but no longer any joy. Pain alone kept my wearisome attachment alive.
The fault I find with our journalism is that it forces us to take an interest in some fresh triviality or other every day, whereas only three or four books in a lifetime give us anything that is of real importance.
… rejoicing in a peace which brings only an increase of anxiety,…
… the good intentions of a third party are powerless to control a woman who is annoyed to find herself pursued even into a ball-room by a man whom she does not love. Too often, the kind friend comes down again alone.
My dears, laugh at me if you like; it is not conventionally beautiful, but there is something in its quaint old face which pleases me. If it could play the piano, I am sure it would really play.
She [Mme des Laumes] belonged to that half of the human race in whom the curiosity the other half feels about the people it does not know is replaced by an interest in the people it does.
As with the future, it is not all at once but grain by grain that one savours the past.
She’s got feet like boats, whiskers like an American, and her undies are filthy.
… she had uttered these words simply in order to provoke a reply in certain other words, which she seemed, indeed, to wish to hear spoken, but, from prudence, would let her friend be the first to speak.
I could no longer desire physically without feeling a need for her, without suffering from her absence.
One felt that in her renunciation of life she had deliberately abandoned those places in which she might at least have been able to see the man she loved, for others where he had never trod.
For in this world of ours where everything withers, everything perishes, there is a thing that decays, that crumbles into dust even more completely, leaving behind still fewer traces of itself, than beauty: namely grief.
Sadness had reigned in undisputed sovereignty over his shadowed childhood.
The inertia of the mind urges it to slide down the easy slope of imagination, rather than to climb the steep slope of introspection.
For a young man has strong imagination but poor judgment, so that he imagines others to be as big as he is but considers himself to be very small. He has unbounded trust in the universe but is constantly unsure of himself.
The wretchedness of ordinary life, endured so gaily when it is part of our normal existence, is made far worse when it comes as something new, and is exaggerated by the working of the imagination.
It is often simply from lack of creative imagination that we do not go far enough in suffering.
Only imagination and belief can differentiate from the rest certain objects, certain people, and can create an atmosphere.
Presently, one after another, like shyly hopping sparrows, her friends arrived, black against the snow.
…we need to bear in mind that our opinion of other people, our ties with friends or family, have only the semblance of fixity and are, in fact, as eternally fluid as the sea.
What criterion ought one to adopt to judge one’s fellows? After all, there was not a single person he knew who might not, in certain circumstances, prove capable of a shameful action.
Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.
And then, gradually, the memory of her would fade away, I had forgotten the girl of my dream.
…but the loss of a memory, like the omission of a phrase during reading, rather than making for uncertainty, can lead to a premature certainty.
But it is always easy to put together stories about a past which nobody any longer remembers, like those about journeys to countries where nobody has ever been.
The being that I shall be after death has no more reason to remember the man I have been since my birth than the latter to remember what I was before it.
For with the perturbations of memory are linked the intermittencies of the heart.
And like an aviator who rolls painfully along the ground until, abruptly, he breaks away from it, I felt myself being slowly lifted towards the silent peaks of memory.
Every person is destroyed when we cease to see him; after which his next appearance is a new creation, different from that which immediately preceded it, if not from them all.
I came to recognise that, apart from her [Françoise’s] own kinsfolk, the sufferings of humanity inspired in her a pity which increased in direct ratio to the distance separating the sufferers from herself.
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.
that profit which good things bestowed on us by teaching to seek pleasure elsewhere than in the barren satisfaction of worldly wealth.
Forgive me, Bertrand, for having on that day loved in you a beauty in which your self-esteem could take no pride, which could not in any way determine my affection.
We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full.
I must choose to cease from suffering or to cease from loving.
in my cowardice I became at once a man, and did what all we grown men do when face to face with suffering and injustice; I preferred not to see them
So few are the easy victories as the ultimate failures.
… Odette seemed a fascinating and desirable woman, the attraction which her body held for him had aroused a painful longing to secure the absolute mastery of even the tiniest particles of her heart.
We consider it innocent to desire, and heinous that the other person should do so.
There is nothing like desire for obstructing any resemblance between what one says and what one has on one’s mind.
It is a mistake,” Labruyère tells us, “to be in love without an ample fortune.
It is always thus, impelled by a state of mind which is destined not to last, we make our irrevocable decisions
It was not evil that gave her the idea of pleasure, that seemed to her attractive; it was pleasure, rather, that seemed evil.
… sterile, splendid torture of understanding and loving…
One wants to be understood because one wants to be loved, and one wants to be loved because one loves.
The best vaccine against anger is to watch others in its throes.
To determine not to think of it was but to think of it still, to suffer from it still.
The habit of thinking prevents us at times from experiencing reality, immunises us against it, makes it seem no more than any other thought.
Her [Odette’s] eyes were beautiful, but so large they seemed to droop beneath their own weight, strained the rest of her face and always made her appear unwell or in a bad mood.
So what I had believed to be nothing to me was simply my entire life. How ignorant one is of oneself.
M. de Charlus persisted in not replying. I thought I could see a smile flicker about his lips: the smile of the man who looks down from a great height on the characters and manners of lesser men.
A ‘real’ person, profoundly as we may sympathise with him, is in a great measure perceptible only through our senses, that is to say, he remains opaque, offers a dead weight which our sensibilities have not the strength to lift.
It is a mistake to speak of a bad choice in love, since as soon as there is a choice it can only be a bad one.
… the objects which we admire have no absolute value in themselves…
The mistakes of doctors are innumerable. They err as a rule out of optimism as to the treatment, and pessimism as to the outcome.
When we are nice to others, we generally lose all claim to their respect.
He [Bloch] was one of those touchy, highly-strung people who cannot bear to have made a blunder, will not admit it to themselves, and whose whole day is ruined by it.
… novels contained something inexpressibly delicious.
Monsieur Beulier never engaged in thought except to speak the truth, and never spoke except to express his thought.
We forgive the crimes of individuals, but not their participation in a collective crime.
And if she had appeared, would I have dared to speak to her?
… the kiss, the bodily surrender which would seem natural and but moderately attractive…
We do not include the pleasures we enjoy in sleep in the inventory of the pleasures we have experienced in the course of our existence.
I spent many a charming evening talking and playing with Albertine, but none so sweet as when I was watching her sleep.
the comfort of reclusion, the poetry of hibernation
The beauty of images lies behind things, the beauty of ideas in front of them.
…for each of us sees clarity only in those ideas which have the same degree of confusion as his own.
… I should have been struck down by the despair a young lover feels who has sworn lifelong fidelity, when a friend speaks to him of the other mistresses he will have in time to come.
Even his mother, his own mother, had once accused him of being a snob.
An excellent but an eccentric man in whom the least little thing would, it seemed, often check the flow of his spirits and divert the current of his thoughts.
A ‘sadist’ of her kind is an artist in evil, which a wholly wicked person could not be…
I never allow myself to be influenced in the smallest degree either by atmospheric disturbances or by the arbitrary divisions of what is known as Time.
Swann, with that almost arrogant charity of a man of the world who, amid the dissolution of all his own moral prejudices, finds in another’s shame merely a reason for treating him with a friendly benevolence…
His [Morel’s] nature was really like a sheet of paper that has been folded so often in every direction that it is impossible to straighten it out.
I have built, deep in my heart, a chapel filled with you.
… it was with an unusual intensity of pleasure, a pleasure destined to have a lasting effect upon his character and conduct…
The glutton usually realizes that gout is ever ready to pounce, and that alcohol is bad for him. But possible disaster weighs light in the scale against certain pleasure.
… I experienced, suddenly, that special pleasure, which bore no resemblance to any other…
Unkindness is inspired by hatred, anger fuels it into action in which there is no great joy; it would take sadism to turn it into something pleasurable; unkind people imagine themselves to be inflicting pain on someone equally unkind.
Love is space and time made perceptible to the heart.
But one never finds a cathedral, a wave in a storm, a dancer’s leap in the air quite as high as one has been expecting;
People are not always very tolerant of the tears which they themselves have provoked.
The facts of life do not penetrate to the sphere in which our beliefs are cherished; as it was not they that engendered those beliefs, so they are powerless to destroy them.
Then his jealousy rejoiced at the discovery, as though that jealousy had had an independent existence, fiercely egotistical, gluttonous of every thing that would feed its vitality, even at the expense of Swann himself.
As soon as jealousy is discovered, it is regarded by the person who is its object as a challenge which justifies deception.
…pretention is very close to stupidity and that simplicity has a less visible but still gratifying aspect.
After luncheon the sun, conscious that it was Saturday, would blaze an hour longer in the zenith,…
Jean’s desires, like those of all men in love, were concentrated on the impossible.
We imagine always when we speak that it is our own ears, our own mind, that are listening.
… it had arrested for all eternity the moment which it had been trying to make pass more quickly.
… the cattleyas especially (these being, with chrysanthemums, her favourite flowers), because they had the supreme merit of not looking in the least like other flowers, but of being made, apparently, out of scraps of silk or satin.
Gardeners produce flowers that are delicious dreams, and others too that are like nightmares.
And what little she allowed herself to say was said in a strained tone, in which her ingrained timidity paralysed her tendency to freedom and audacity of speech.
A book is like a large cemetery upon whose tombs one can no longer read the effaced names. On the other hand, sometimes one remembers well the name, without knowing if anything of the being, whose name it was, survives in these pages.
Prosperity of wicked men runs like a torrent past, and soon is spent.
Even from the point of view of coquetry, pure and simple,” he had told her, “can’t you see how much of your attraction you throw away when you stoop to lying?
Was the happiness of knowing these girls really unattainable? It would certainly not have been the first happiness of that sort which I had abandoned all hope of ever enjoying?
It was not that Madame Santeuil’s moral values had altered, but only her view of the moral values of others.
… the serpent hissing between the lips of Envy is so huge, and so completely fills her wide-opened mouth that the muscles of her face are strained and contorted,…
Whenever she saw in others an advantage, however trivial, which she herself lacked, she would persuade herself that it was no advantage at all, but a drawback, and would pity so as not to have to envy them.
… the reigns of the kings and queens who are portrayed as kneeling with clasped hands in the windows of churches, were stained by oppression and bloodshed.
Dinner-parties bore us because our imagination is absent, and reading interests us because it is keeping us company.
The fixity of a habit is generally in direct proportion to its absurdity.
A person has no need of sincerity, nor even of skill in lying, in order to be loved. Here I mean by love reciprocal torture.
The fault I find in our journalism is that it forces us to take an interest in some fresh triviality or other everyday, whereas only three or four books in a lifetime give us anything that is of real importance.
We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full.
Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and composed our masterpieces. Never will the world know all it owes to them nor all they have suffered to enrich us.
Until I saw Chardin’s painting I never realized how much beauty lay around me in my parents’ house in the half-cleared table in the corner of a tablecloth left awry in the knife beside the empty oyster shell.
There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we believe we left without having lived them: those we spent with a favourite book.
We do not succeed in changing things according to our desire but gradually our desire changes.
All our final resolutions are made in a state of mind which is not going to last.
It is always thus impaled by a state of mind which is destined not to last that we make our irrevocable decisions.
People wish to learn to swim and at the same time to keep one foot on the ground.
People can have many different kinds of pleasure. The real one is that for which they will forsake the others.
Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and composed our masterpieces. Never will the world know all it owes to them nor all they have suffered to enrich us.
Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and composed our masterpieces. Never will the world know all it owes to them nor all they have suffered to enrich us.
Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and composed our masterpieces. Never will the world know all it owes to them nor all they have suffered to enrich us.
Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and composed our masterpieces. Never will the world know all it owes to them nor all they have suffered to enrich us.
Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and composed our masterpieces. Never will the world know all it owes to them nor all they have suffered to enrich us.
Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and composed our masterpieces. Never will the world know all it owes to them nor all they have suffered to enrich us.
Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and composed our masterpieces. Never will the world know all it owes to them nor all they have suffered to enrich us.
Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and composed our masterpieces. Never will the world know all it owes to them nor all they have suffered to enrich us.
The opinions which we hold of one another our relations with friends and kinsfolk are in no sense permanent save in appearance but are as eternally fluid as the sea itself.
At the heart of our friendly or purely social relations there lurks a hostility momentarily cured but recurring in fits and starts.
Let us leave pretty women to men without imagination.
There can be no peace of mind in love since the advantage one has secured is never anything by a fresh starting-point for further desires.
There can be no peace of mind in love since the advantage one has secured is never anything but a fresh starting-point for further desires.
That which we remember of our conduct is ignored by our closest neighbour but that which we have forgotten having said or even what we never said will cause laughter even into the next world.
The time which we have at our disposal every day is elastic the passions that we feel expand it those that we inspire contract it and habit fills up the rest.
The time which we have at our disposal every day is elastic the passions that we feel expand it those that we inspire contract it and habit fills up what remains.
The opinions which we hold of one another our relations with friends and kinsfolk are in no sense permanent save in appearance but are as eternally fluid as the sea itself.
The opinions which we hold of one another our relations with friends and kinsfolk are in no sense permanent save in appearance but are as eternally fluid as the sea itself.
The opinions which we hold of one another our relations with friends and kinsfolk are in no sense permanent save in appearance but are as eternally fluid as the sea itself.
The opinions which we hold of one another our relations with friends and kinsfolk are in no sense permanent save in appearance but are as eternally fluid as the sea itself.
The opinions which we hold of one another our relations with friends and kinsfolk are in no sense permanent save in appearance but are as eternally fluid as the sea itself.
The opinions which we hold of one another our relations with friends and kinsfolk are in no sense permanent save in appearance but are as eternally fluid as the sea itself.
The opinions which we hold of one another our relations with friends and kinsfolk are in no sense permanent save in appearance but are as eternally fluid as the sea itself.
The opinions which we hold of one another our relations with friends and kinsfolk are in no sense permanent save in appearance but are as eternally fluid as the sea itself.
We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full.
The past not merely is not fugitive it remains present.
Certainly, it is more reasonable to devote one’s life to women than to postage stamps, old snuff-boxes, or even to paintings and statues.
A powerful idea communicates some of its strength to him who challenges it.
As long as men are free to ask what they must, free to say what they think, free to think what they will, freedom can never be lost and science can never regress.
We are healed from suffering only by experiencing it to the full.
Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.
Happiness serves hardly any other purpose than to make unhappiness possible.
Three-quarters of the sicknesses of intelligent people come from their intelligence. They need at least a doctor who can understand this sickness.
Like many intellectuals, he was incapable of saying a simple thing in a simple way.
Time passes, and little by little everything that we have spoken in falsehood becomes true.
Let us leave pretty women to men devoid of imagination.
We are able to find everything in our memory, which is like a dispensary or chemical laboratory in which chance steers our hand sometimes to a soothing drug and sometimes to a dangerous poison.
Illness is the doctor to whom we pay most heed; to kindness, to knowledge, we make promise only; pain we obey.
We must never be afraid to go too far, for truth lies beyond.
Only through art can we emerge from ourselves and know what another person sees.
Let us be grateful to people who make us happy, they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.
We don’t receive wisdom we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.
A change in the weather is sufficient to recreate the world and ourselves.