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f3b6c33
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People are not always very tolerant of the tears which they themselves have provoked.
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provocation
tears
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Marcel Proust |
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19725a9
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But when one believes in the reality of things, making them visible by artificial means is not quite the same as feeling that they are close at hand.
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Marcel Proust |
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753896d
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Once we have reached a certain degree of enfeeblement, whether caused by age or by ill health, all pleasure taken at the expense of sleep, every disturbance of routine, becomes a nuisance.
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Marcel Proust |
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589c0e2
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What best remind us of a person is precisely what we had forgotten (because it was of no importance, and we therefore left it in full possession of its strength). That is why the better part of our memories exist outside us, in a blatter of rain, in the smell of an unaired room or of the first crackling brushwood fire in a cold grate: wherever, in short, we happen upon what our mind, having no use for it, had rejected, the last treasure tha..
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Marcel Proust |
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41b295f
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Most of our faculties lie dormant because they can rely upon Habit, which knows what there is to be done and has no need of their services.
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Marcel Proust |
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9c9d8f1
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a writer's works, like the water in an artesian well, mount to a height which is in proportion to the depth to which suffering has penetrated his soul.
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Marcel Proust |
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7ac0dd8
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And so it is with our own past. It is a labour in vain to attempt to recapture it: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile. The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) of which we have no inkling. And it depends on chance whether or not we come upon this object before we ourselves must die.
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Marcel Proust |
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4369074
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We have such numerous interests in our lives that it is not uncommon, on a single occasion, for the foundations of a happiness that does not yet exist to be laid down alongside the intensification of a grief from which we are still suffering.
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hope
perserverance
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Marcel Proust |
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75e69f3
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For often I have wished to see a person again without realising that it was simply because that personal recalled to me a hedge of hawthorns in blossom, and I have been led to believe, and to make someone else believe, in a renewal of affection, by what was no more than an inclination to travel.
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Marcel Proust |
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f997fa7
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For everyone who, having no artistic sense-that is to say, no submission to subjective reality-may have the knack of reasoning about art till doomsday, especially if he be, in addition, a diplomat or financier in contact with the 'realities' of the present day, is only too ready to believe literature is an intellectual game which is destined to gradually be abandoned as time goes on.
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Marcel Proust |
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c8ffcfe
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The relations one has with a woman one loves (and that can apply also to love for a youth) can remain platonic for other reasons than the chastity of the woman or the unsensual nature of the love she inspires. The reason may be that the lover is too impatient and by the very excess of his love is unable to await the moment when he will obtain his desires by sufficient pretence of indifference. Continually, he returns to the charge, he never..
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Marcel Proust |
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b3b2573
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that melancholy which we feel when we cease to obey orders which, from one day to another, keep the future hidden, and realise that we have at last begun to live in real earnest, as a grown-up person, the life, the only life that any of us has at his disposal.
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Marcel Proust |
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34fc4e3
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Our shadows, now parallel, now close together and joined, traced an exquisite pattern at our feet.
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Marcel Proust |
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9b4791f
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Happiness is salutary for the body but sorrow develops the powers of the spirit.
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Marcel Proust |
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b87ed70
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A change in the weather is sufficient to recreate the world and ourselves.
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nature
growth
weather
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Marcel Proust |
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469f4a1
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Fall in love with a dog's bum, And thou'll think it pretty as a plum.
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Marcel Proust |
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354ed8d
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We are, when we love, in an abnormal state, capable of giving at once to the most apparently simple accident, an accident which may at any moment occur, a seriousness which in itself it would not entail. What makes us so happy is the presence in our hearts of an unstable element which we contrive perpetually to maintain and of which we cease almost to be aware so long as it is not displaced. In reality, there is in love a permanent strain o..
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Marcel Proust |
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62997d5
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When we are in love, our love is too big a thing for us to be able altogether to contain it within ourselves. It radiates towards the loved one, finds there a surface which arrests it, forcing it to return to its starting-point, and it is this repercussion of our own feeling which we call the other's feelings and which charms us more then than on its outward journey because we do not recognise it as having originated in ourselves.
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Marcel Proust |
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a38a332
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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.
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unkindness
sadism
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Marcel Proust |
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c21a8b0
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Poets claim that we recapture for a moment the self that we were long ago when we enter some house or garden in which we used to live in our youth. But these are most hazardous pilgrimages, which end as often in disappointment as in success. It is in ourselves that we should rather seek to find those fixed places, contemporaneous with different years.
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Marcel Proust |
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3490838
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Most of the supposed expressions of our feelings merely relieve us of them by drawing them out of us in an indistinct form that does not teach us to know them.
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Marcel Proust |
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5f6672a
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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.
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words
literature
reading
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Marcel Proust |
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ff9b035
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It is illness that makes us recognize that we do not live in isolation but are chained to a being from a different realm, worlds apart from us and by whom it is impossible to make ourselves understood: our body. Were we to meet a brigand on the road, we might manage to make him conscious of his own personal interest if not our plight. But to ask pity of our body is like talking to an octopus, for which our words can have no more meaning tha..
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illness
mind-body-connection
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Marcel Proust |
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dc5786a
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We betroth ourselves by proxy, and then feel obliged to marry the intermediary.
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Marcel Proust |
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920a98a
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Quartering the topmost branches of one of the tall trees, an invisible bird was striving to make the day seem shorter, exploring with a long-drawn note the solitude that pressed it on every side, but it received at once so unanimous an answer, so powerful a repercussion of silence and of immobility, that one felt it had arrested for all eternity the moment which it had been trying to make pass more quickly.
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solitude
silence
birdsong
passage-of-time
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Marcel Proust |
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60c15ab
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None of us constitutes a material whole, identical for everyone, which a person has only to go look up as though we were a book of specifications or a last testament; our social personality is a creation of the minds of others. Even the very simple act that we call "seeing a person we know" is in part an intellectual one. We fill the physical appearance of the individual we see with all the notions we have about him, and of the total pictur..
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Marcel Proust |
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2d689cd
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At that time, he was satisfying a sensual curiosity by experiencing the pleasures of people who live for love. He had believed he could stop there, that he would not be obliged to learn their sorrows; how small a thing her charm was for him now compared with the astounding terror that extended out from it like a murky halo, the immense anguish of not knowing at every moment what she had been doing, of not possessing her everywhere and alway..
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love
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Marcel Proust |
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deaa842
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Sometimes, as Eve was born from one of Adam's ribs, a woman was born during my sleep from a cramped position of my thigh. Formed from the pleasure I was on the point of enjoying, she, I imagined, was the one offering it to me. My body, which felt in hers my own warmth, would try to find itself inside her, I would wake up. The rest of humanity seemed very remote compared to this woman I had left scarcely a few moments before; my cheek was st..
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sleep
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Marcel Proust |
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e6fdc29
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After a certain age our memories are so intertwined with one another that what we are thinking of, the book we are reading, scarcely matters any more. We have put something of ourselves everywhere, everything is fertile, everything is dangerous, and we can make discoveries no less precious than in Pascal's in an advertisement for soap.
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Marcel Proust |
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c24ce3a
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This was not to say, however, that she did not long, at times, for some greater change, that she did not experience some of those exceptional moments when one thirsts for something other than what is, and when those who, through lack of energy or imagination, are unable to generate any motive power in themselves, cry out, as the clock strikes or the postman knocks, for something new, even if it is worse, some emotion, some sorrow; when the ..
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Marcel Proust |
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f7025e7
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You know Balbec so well - do you have friends in the area?' I have friends wherever there are companies of trees, wounded but not vanquished, which huddle together with touching obstinacy to implore an inclement and pitiless sky.' That is not what I meant,' interrupted my father, as obstinate as the trees and as pitiless as the sky.
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nature
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Marcel Proust |
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850d588
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Let us be grateful to people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners
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Marcel Proust |
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ad15177
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in all countries fools outnumber the rest;
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Marcel Proust |
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8befdf7
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Each of us is indeed alone.
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Marcel Proust |
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6880b97
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We passionately long that there may be another life in which we shall be similar to what we are here below. But we do not pause to reflect that, even without waiting for that other life, in this life, after a few years we are unfaithful to what we have been, to what we wished to remain immortally.
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Marcel Proust |
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62325a2
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when the heartstrings, which contentment has silenced, like a harp laid by, yearn to be plucked and sounded again by some hand, however rough, even if it should break them;
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Marcel Proust |
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4e20ae2
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kht! goeRnkhry baesaer mroevaekhnd dYnYt. baeLm symyaekh khae laewnmn haeyae waekh khoey RdaegrY..
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Marcel Proust |
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6f36d29
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Illness is the most heeded of doctors: to kindness and wisdom we make promises only; pain we obey.
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Marcel Proust |
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59f801f
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The idea of popular art, like that of a patriotic art, if not actually dangerous seemed to me ridiculous. If the intention was to make art accessible to the people by sacrificing refinements of form, on the ground that they are "all right for the idle rich" but not for anybody else, I had seen enough of fashionable society to know that it is there that one finds real illiteracy and not, let us say, among electricians."
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Marcel Proust |
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3d5a751
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But to ask pity of our body is like discoursing in front of an octopus, for which our words can have no more meaning than the sound of the tides, and with which we should be appalled to find ourselves condemned to live.
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Marcel Proust |
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e0318d4
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It is not because other people are dead that our affection for them grows faint, it is because we ourselves are dying.
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Marcel Proust |
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c5da983
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Whether it is because the faith which creates has ceased to exist in me, or because reality takes shape in the memory alone, the flowers that people show me nowadays for the first time never seem to me to be true flowers.
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Marcel Proust |
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db5bf7b
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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.
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Marcel Proust |
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e3a29eb
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Hoeveel bedroevender nog dan vroeger vond ik het sedert die dag (...) dat ik geen aanleg voor schrijven had en ervan moest afzien ooit een beroemde schrijver te worden.
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beroemd
schrijven
talent
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Marcel Proust |