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433c51f
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Let us leave pretty women to men with no imagination.
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women
imagination
proust
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Marcel Proust |
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ecfb108
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I wished to see storms only on those coasts where they raged with most violence...
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proust
|
Marcel Proust |
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bf0703e
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But genius, and even great talent, springs less from seeds of intellect and social refinement superior to those of other people than from the faculty of transforming and transposing them. To heat a liquid with an electric lamp requires not the strongest lamp possible, but one of which the current can cease to illuminate, can be diverted so as to give heat instead of light. To mount the skies it is not necessary to have the most powerful of motors, one must have a motor which, instead of continuing to run along the earth's surface, intersecting with a vertical line the horizontal line which it began by following, is capable of converting its speed into lifting power. Similarly, the men who produce works of genius are not those who live in the most delicate atmosphere, whose conversation is the most brilliant or their culture the most extensive, but those who have had the power, ceasing suddenly to live only for themselves, to transform their personality into a sort of mirror, in such a way that their life, however mediocre it may be socially and even, in a sense, intellectually, is reflected by it, genius consisting in reflecting power and not int he intrinsic quality of the scene reflected.
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time
seed
social
proust
genius
talent
intellect
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Marcel Proust |
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b9f47c2
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I cannot express the uneasiness caused in me by this intrusion of mystery and beauty into a room I had at last filled with myself to the point of paying no more attention to the room than to that self. The anesthetizing influence of habit having ceased, I would begin to have thoughts, and feelings, and they are such sad things.
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rooms
proust
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Marcel Proust |
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9510ad4
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Habit enables us to cling to the familiar, to the self we think we know with a persistence almost irresistible. An anodyne for the terror of the unknown, it effectively keeps us from knowing, and is fatal in itself. Habit is a fiction the organism requires to dim perception. It screens us from the world, and from the true world of the self. Habit--no matter how intense the suffering it causes--is the last thing the personality will give up. It is arming itself against danger. The weapons may be more painful to use than the pain they seek to deflect. No matter. Habit allows us to live--by which Proust means it allows us to exist while it simultaneously compels us to miss Life.
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proust
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Howard Moss |
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fd0661d
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(Just to give you an idea, Proust's reply was 'To be separated from Mama.') I think that the lowest depth of misery ought to be distinguished from the highest pitch of anguish. In the lower depths come enforced idleness, sexual boredom, and/or impotence. At the highest pitch, the death of a friend or even the fear of the death of a child.
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sex
friends
fear
death
proust-questionnaire
impotence
mothers
idleness
proust
misery
children
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Christopher Hitchens |
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f636985
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Translation error is compounded by bias error. We distort others by forcing into them our preferred ideas and gestalts, a process Proust beautifully describes: We pack the physical outline of the creature we see with all the ideas we already formed about him, and in the complete picture of him which we compose in our minds, these ideas have certainly the principal place. In the end they come to fill out so completely the curve of his cheeks, to follow so exactly the line of his nose, they blend so harmoniously in the sound of his voice that these seem to be no more than a transparent envelope, so that each time we see the face or hear the voice it is our own ideas of him which we recognize and to which we listen.
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metaphor
psychology-analysis
translation-error
proust
psychology
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Irvin D. Yalom |
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53926f0
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...the nose is generally the organ in which stupidity is most readily displayed.
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proust
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Marcel Proust |
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c415af6
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Carried away in a sort of dream, he smiled, then he began to hurry back towards the lady; he was walking faster than usual, and his shoulders swayed backwards and forwards, right and left, in the most absurd fashion; altogether he looked, so utterly had he abandoned himself to it, ignoring all other considerations, as though he were the lifeless and wire-pulled puppet of his own happiness.
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swann-s-way
puppet
proust
|
Marcel Proust |
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4c71ec3
|
El pasado, decia Proust, no solo es fugaz, es que no se mueve de sitio. Con Paris pasa lo mismo, jamas ha salido de viaje. Y encima es interminable, no se acaba nunca.
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pasado
proust
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Enrique Vila-Matas |
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3ee5066
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Anyone who's read all of Proust plus The Man withour Qualities is bound t be missing out on a few other titles.
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literature
reading
remembrance-of-things-past
robert-musil
the-man-without-qualities
proust
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Lorrie Moore |
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a004101
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... 'You can't read everything. I've never got beyond the beginning of Proust. I love him, but I can't seem to get beyond about page three.' They were comfortable in each other's company, and this confession seemed to accentuate the ease of their relationship. The confession itself was not entirely true; Isabel had read more Proust than that, but other people undoubtedly found it reassuring to think that one had only read a few pages. Certainly those who claimed to have read Proust in his entirety got scant sympathy from others. And yet, she suddenly wondered, should you actually lie about how much Proust you've read? Some politicians, she reminded herself, did that--or the equivalent--when they claimed to be down-to-earth, no-nonsense types, just like the voters, when all the time they were secretly delighting in Proust . . .
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politicians
proust
lie
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Alexander McCall Smith |