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No Sooner Had The Warm Liquid Mixed With The Crumbs Touched My Palate Than A Shudder Ran Through Me And I Stopped, Intent Upon The Extraordinary Thing That Was Happening To Me.

-Marcel Proust

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No Sooner Had The

Marcel Proust

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No Sooner Had The Warm Liquid Mixed With The Crumbs Touched My Palate Than A Shudder Ran Through Me And I Stopped, Intent Upon The Extraordinary Thing That Was Happening To Me.

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I Shall Not Find A Painting More Beautiful Because The Artist Has Painted A Hawthorn In The Foreground, Though I Know Of Nothing More Beautiful Than The Hawthorn, For I Wish To Remain Sincere And Because I Know That The Beauty Of A Painting Does Not Depend On The Things Represented In It. I Shall Not Collect Images Of Hawthorn. I Do Not Venerate Hawthorn, I Go To See And Smell It.

...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.

Now The Same Mystery Which Often Veils From Our Eyes The Reason For A Catastrophe Envelops Just As Frequently, When Love Is In Question, The Suddenness Of Certain Happy Solutions, Such As Had Been Brought To Me By Gilberte's Letter. Happy, Or At Least Seemingly Happy, For There Are Few That Can Really Be Happy When We Are Dealing With A Sentiment Of Such A Kind That Any Satisfaction We Can Give It Does No More, As A Rule, Than Dislodge Some Pain. And Yet Sometimes A Respite Is Granted Us, And We Have For A Little While The Illusion Of Being Healed.

We Are Less Justified In Saying That The Thinking Life Of Humanity Is A Miraculous Perfectioning Of Animal And Physical Life Than That It Is An Imperfection In The Organization Of Spiritual Life As Rudimentary As The Communal Existence Of Protozoa In Colonies.

Indeed, Among The Lesser Auxiliaries To Success In Love, An Absence, The Declining Of An Invitation To Dinner, An Unintentional, Unconscious Harshness Are Of More Service Than All The Cosmetics And Fine Clothes In The World.

The World Was Not Created Once And For All Time For Each Of Us Individually. There Are Added To It In The Course Of Our Life Things Of Which We Have Never Had Any Suspicion.

Like Everybody Who Is Not In Love, He Thought One Chose The Person To Be Loved After Endless Deliberations And On The Basis Of Particular Qualities Or Advantages.

To Achieve Accurate Knowledge Of Others, If Such A Thing Were Possible, We Could Only Ever Arrive At It Through The Slow And Unsure Recognition Of Our Own Initial Optical Inaccuracies. However, Such Knowledge Is Not Possible: For, While Our Vision Of Others Is Being Adjusted, They, Who Are Not Made Of Mere Brute Matter, Are Also Changing; We Think We Have Managed To See Them More Clearly, But They Shift; And When We Believe We Have Them Fully In Focus, It Is Merely Our Older Images Of Them That We Have Clarified, But Which Are Themselves Already Out Of Date.

An Hour Is Not Merely An Hour, It Is A Vase Full Of Scents And Sounds And Projects And Climates.

Our Virtues Themselves Are Not Free And Floating Qualities Over Which We Retain A Permanent Control And Power Of Disposal; They Come To Be So Closely Linked In Our Minds With The Actions In Conjunction With Which We Have Made It Our Duty To Exercise Them That If We Come To Engage In An Activity Of A Different Kind, It Catches Us Off Guard And Without The Slightest Awareness That It Might Involve The Application Of Those Same Virtues.

We Say That We Often See Animals In Our Dreams, But We Forget That Almost Always We Are Ourselves Animals Therein, Deprived Of That Reasoning Power Which Projects Upon Things The Light Of Certainty; On The Contrary We Bring To Bear On The Spectacle Of Life Only A Dubious Vision, Extinguished Anew Every Moment By Oblivion, The Former Reality Fading Before That Which Follows It As One Projection Of A Magic Lantern Fades Before The Next As We Change The Slide.

The Only Paradise Is Paradise Lost.

The Soldier Is Convinced That A Certain Indefinitely Extendable Time Period Is Accorded Him Before He Is Killed, The Burglar Before He Is Caught, Men In General, Before They Must Die. That Is The Amulet Which Preserves Individuals — And Sometimes Populations — Not From Danger, But From The Fear Of Danger, In Reality From The Belief In Danger, Which In Some Cases Allows Them To Brave It Without Being Brave. Such A Confidence, Just As Unfounded, Supports The Lover Who Counts On A Reconciliation, A Letter.

No Exile At The South Pole Or On The Summit Of Mont Blanc Separates Us More Effectively From Others Than The Practice Of A Hidden Vice.

The Fact Of The Matter Is That, Since We Are Determined Always To Keep Our Feelings To Ourselves, We Have Never Given Any Thought To The Manner In Which We Should Express Them. And Suddenly There Is Within Us A Strange And Obscene Animal Making Itself Heard, Whose Tones May Inspire As Much Alarm In The Person Who Receives The Involuntary, Elliptical And Almost Irresistible Communication Of One's Defect Or Vice As Would The Sudden Avowal Indirectly And Outlandishly Proffered By A Criminal Who Can No Longer Refrain From Confessing To A Murder Of Which One Had Never Imagined Him To Be Guilty.

It Is The Wicked Deception Of Love That It Begins By Making Us Dwell Not Upon A Woman In The Outside World But Upon A Doll Inside Our Head, The Only Woman Who Is Always Available In Fact, The Only One We Shall Ever Possess, Whom The Arbitrary Nature Of Memory, Almost As Absolute As That Of The Imagination, May Have Made As Different From The Real Woman As The Real Balbec Had Been From The Balbec I Imagined- A Dummy Creation That Little By Little, To Our Own Detriment, We Shall Force The Real Woman To Resemble.

In Reality, Every Reader Is, While Reading, The Reader Of His Own Self.

On Ne Re C° Oit Pas La Sagesse, Il Faut La De Couvrir Soi-me" Me, Apre' S Un Trajet Que Personne Ne Peut Faire Pour Nous, Ne Peut Nous E Pargner. We Do Not Receive Wisdom.we Must Discover It Ourselves After Experiences Which No One Else Can Have For Us And From Which No One Else Can Spare Us.

That Translucent Alabaster Of Our Memories.

A Woman Whom We Need And Who Makes Us Suffer Elicits From Us A Whole Gamut Of Feelings Far More Profound And Vital Than A Man Of Genius Who Interests Us.

Each Reader Reads Only What Is Already Within Himself. The Book Is Only A Sort Of Optical Instrument Which The Writer Offers To The Reader To Enable The Latter To Discover In Himself What He Would Not Have Found But For The Aid Of The Book.

In Summoning Even The Wisest Of Physicians To Our Aid, It Is Probably That He Is Relying Upon A Scientific "truth", The Error Of Which Will Become Obvious In Just A Few Years' Time.

No Sooner Had The Warm Liquid Mixed With The Crumbs Touched My Palate Than A Shudder Ran Through Me And I Stopped, Intent Upon The Extraordinary Thing That Was Happening To Me.

It Is The Tragedy Of Other People That They Are To Us Merely Showcases For The Very Perishable Collections Of Our Own Mind.

Women Who Are To Some Extent Resistant, Whom One Cannot Possess At Once, Whom One Does Not Even Know At First Whether One Will Ever Possess, Are The Only Interesting Ones.

When We Have Passed A Certain Age, The Soul Of The Child That We Were And The Souls Of The Dead From Whom We Sprang Come And Shower Upon Us Their Riches And Their Spells, Asking To Be Allowed To Contribute To The New Emotions Which We Feel And In Which, Erasing Their Former Image, We Recast Them In An Original Creation.

A Work Should Convey Its Entire Meaning By Itself, Imposing It On The Spectator Even Before He Knows What The Subject Is.

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.

A Man May Have Spent His Life Among The Great Ones Of The Earth, Who To Him Have Been Merely Boring Relatives Or Tedious Acquaintances Because A Familiarity Engendered In The Cradle Had Stripped Them Of All Glamour In His Eyes.

A Sort Of Egotistical Self-evaluation Is Unavoidable In Those Joys In Which Erudition And Art Mingle And In Which Aesthetic Pleasure May Become More Acute, But Not Remain As Pure.

In A Separation It Is The One Who Is Not Really In Love Who Says The More Tender Things.

At A Certain Age, We Have Already Been Struck By Love; It No Longer Develops Alone, According To Its Own Mysteries And Fateful Laws While Our Hearts Stand By Startled And Passive. We Come To Its Assistancerecognizing One Of Its Symptoms, We Recall, We Bring Back To Life The Others. Since We Possess Its Song Engraved In Its Totality Within Us, We Do Not Need For A Woman To Tell Us The Beginning--filled With Admiration Inspired By Beauty--to Find The Continuation.

Words Do Not Change Their Meanings So Drastically In The Course Of Centuries As, In Our Minds, Names Do In The Course Of A Year Or Two.

Life Is Extraordinarily Suave And Sweet With Certain Natural, Witty, Affectionate People Who Have Unusual Distinction And Are Capable Of Every Vice, But Who Make A Display Of None In Public And About Whom No One Can Affirm They Have A Single One. There Is Something Supple And Secret About Them. Besides, Their Perversity Gives Spice To Their Most Innocent Occupations, Such As Taking A Walk In The Garden At Night.

Only Through Art Can We Get Outside Of Ourselves And Know Another's View Of The Universe Which Is Not The Same As Ours And See Landscapes Which Otherwise Would Remain Unknown To Us Like The Landscapes Of The Moon. Thanks To Art, Instead Of Seeing A Single World, Our Own, We See It Multiply Until We Have Before Us As Many Worlds As There Are Original Artists.

We Can Only Be Faithful To What We Remember, And We Remember Only What We Have Known.

A Person Does Not...stand Motionless And Clear Before Our Eyes With His Merits, His Defects, His Plans, His Intentions With Regard To Ourself Exposed On His Surface...but Is A Shadow Which We Can Never Succeed In Penetrating...a Shadow Behind Which We Can Alternately Imagine, With Equal Justification, That There Burns The Flame Of Hatred And Of Love.

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.

In A Language Known To Us, We Have Substituted The Opacity Of The Sounds With The Transparence Of The Ideas. But A Language We Donot Know Is A Closed Place In Which The One We Love Can Deceive Us, Making Us, Locked Outside And Convulsed In Our Impotence, Incapable Of Seeing Or Preventing Anything.

Are Not The Thoughts Of The Dying Often Turned Towards The Practical, Painful, Obscure, Visceral Aspect, Towards The "seamy Side" Of Death Which Is, As It Happens, The Side That Death Actually Presents To Them And Forces Them To Feel, And Which Far More Closely Resembles A Crushing Burden, A Difficulty In Breathing, A Destroying Thirst, Than The Abstract Idea To Which We Are Accustomed To Give The Name Of Death?

We Are At Times Too Ready To Believe That The Present Is The Only Possible State Of Things.

It Is Up To My Spirit To Find The Truth. But How? Grave Uncertainty, Each Time The Spirit Feels Beyond Its Own Comprehension; Whenit, The Explorer, Is Altogether To Obscure Land That It Must Search And Where All Its Baggage Is Of No Use. To Search? That Is Not All: To Create.

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.

Habit Is A Second Nature Which Prevents Us From Knowing The First, Of Which It Has Neither The Cruelties Nor The Enchantments.

Love Is Space And Time Measured By The Heart.

There Can Be No Peace Of Mind In Love, Since The Advantage One Has Secured Is Never Anything But A Fresh Starting-point For Future Desires.

And Wasn't My Mind Also Like Another Crib In The Depths Of Which I Felt I Remained Ensconced, Even In Order To Watch What Was Happening Outside? When I Saw An External Object, My Awareness That I Was Seeing It Would Remain Between Me And It, Lining It With A Thin Spiritual Border That Prevented Me From Ever Directly Touching Its Substance; It Would Volatize In Some Way Before I Could Make Contact With It, Just As An Incandescent Body Brought Near A Wet Object Never Touches Its Moisture Because It Is Always Preceded By A Zone Of Evaporation.

This Love Of Ours, In So Far As It Is A Love For One Particular Creature, Is Not Perhaps A Very Real Thing, Since, Though Associations Of Pleasant Or Painful Musings Can Attach It For A Time To A Woman To The Extent Of Making Us Believe That It Has Been Inspired By Her In A Logically Necessary Way, If On The Other Hand We Detach Ourselves Deliberately Or Unconsciously From Those Associations, This Love, As Though It Were In Fact Spontaneous And Sprang From Ourselves Alone, Will Revive In Order To Bestow Itself On Another Woman.

Even From The Simplest, The Most Realistic Point Of View, The Countries Which We Long For Occupy, At Any Given Moment, A Far Larger Place In Our Actual Life Than The Country In Which We Happen To Be.

The Courage Of One's Opinions Is Always A Form Of Calculating Cowardice In The Eyes Of The "other Side.

The Only True Voyage Would Be Not To Travel Through A Hundred Different Lands, But To See The Same Land Through A Hundred Different Pairs Of Eyes.

The Great Renunciation Of Old Age As It Prepared For Death, Wraps Itself Up In Its Chrysalis, Which May Be Observed At The End Of Lives That Are At All Prolonged, Even In Old Lovers Who Have Lived For One Another, In Old Friends Bound By The Closest Ties Of Mutual Sympathy, Who, After A Certain Year, Cease To Make The Necessary Journey Or Even To Cross The Street To See One Another, Cease To Correspond, And Know That They Will Communicate No More In This World.

La Possession De Ce Qu'on Aime Est Une Joie Plus Grande Encore Que L'amour. Possessing What One Loves Is An Even Greater Joy Than Love Itself.

L'ide E Qu'on Mourra Est Plus Cruelle Que Mourir, Mais Moins Que L'ide E Qu'un Autre Est Mort. The Idea Of Dying Is Worse Than Dying Itself, But Less Cruel Than The Idea That Another Has Died.

The Only Thing That Does Not Change Is That At Any And Every Time It Appears That There Have Been Great Changes.

Nobility Is Often No More Than The Inner Aspect Which Our Egotistical Feelings Assume When We Have Not Yet Named And Classified Them.

The True Voyage Of Discovery Is Not A Journey To A New Place; It Is Learning To See With New Eyes.

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.

We See Things But We Don't See Them, Like Things That Slid Through The Mind, One Flowing Into Another.

To Be An Artist Is To Fail, As No Other Dare To Fail... Failure Is His World And The Shrink From It Desertion

The Moments Of The Past Do Not Remain Still; They Retain In Our Memory The Motion Which Drew Them Towards The Future, Towards A Future Which Has Itself Become The Past, And Draw Us On In Their Train.

For A Long Time I Would Go To Bed Early. [fr., Longtemps, Je Me Suis Couche De Bonne Heure.]

People Can Have Many Different Kinds Of Pleasure. The Real One Is That For Which They Will Forsake The Others.

There Is Probably No One, However Rigid His Virtue, Who Is Not Liable To Find Himself, By The Complexity Of Circumstances, Living At Close Quarters With The Very Vice Which He Himself Has Been Most Outspoken In Condemning -- Without Altogether Recognizing It Beneath The Disguise Of Ambiguous Behavior Which It Assumes In His Presence.

A Certain Similarity Exists, Although The Type Evolves, Between All The Women We Love, A Similarity That Is Due To The Fixity Of Our Own Temperament, Which It Is That Chooses Them, Eliminating All Those Who Would Not Be At Once Our Opposite And Our Complement, Fitted That Is To Say To Gratify Our Senses And To Wring Our Heart.

And Indeed When We Are No Longer In Love With Women Whom We Meet After Many Years, Is There Not The Abyss Of Death Between Them And Ourselves, Just As Much As If They Were No Longer Of This World, Since The Fact That We Are No Longer In Love Makes The People That They Were Or The Person That We Were Then As Good As Dead?

Daughters Of The Attitude That Produced Them, Certain Women Will Not Appeal To Us Without The Double Bed In Which We Find Peace By Their Side, While Others, To Be Caressed With A More Secret Intention, Require Leaves Blown By The Wind, Water Rippling In The Dark, Things As Light And Fleeting As They Are.

Which Of Course Is Followed By: For Those Who Have Awareness, A Hint Is Quite Enough. For The Multitudes Of Heedless Mere Knowledge Is Useless. Haji Bektash Veli We Don't Receive Wisdom; We Must Discover It For Ourselves After A Journey That No One Can Take For Us Or Spare Us.

For Each Illness That Doctors Cure With Medicine, They Provoke Ten In Healthy People By Inoculating Them With The Virus That Is A Thousand Times More Powerful Than Any Microbe: The Idea That One Is Ill.

Every Kiss Provokes Another. Oh, In Those Earliest Days Of Love How Naturally The Kisses Spring To Life! So Closely, In Their Profusion, Do They Crowd Together That Lovers Would Find It As Hard To Count The Kisses Exchanged In An Hour As To Count The Flowers In A Meadow In May.

What Artists Call Posterity Is The Posterity Of The Work Of Art.

I Find Very Reasonable The Celtic Belief That The Souls Of Our Dearly Departed Are Trapped In Some Inferior Being, In An Animal, Aplant, An Inanimate Object, Indeed Lost To Us Until The Day, Which For Some Never Arrives, When We Find That We Pass Near The Tree, Or Come To Possess The Object Which Is Their Prison. Then They Quiver, Call Us, And As Soon As We Have Recognized Them, The Spell Is Broken. Freed By Us, They Have Vanquished Death And Return To Live With Us.

Every Reader, As He Reads, Is Actually The Reader Of Himself. The Writer's Work Is Only A Kind Of Optical Instrument He Provides The Reader So He Can Discern What He Might Never Have Seen In Himself Without This Book. The Reader's Recognition In Himself Of What The Book Says Is The Proof Of The Book's Truth.

It Is Comforting When One Has A Sorrow To Lie In The Warmth Of One's Bed And There, Abandoning All Effort And All Resistance, To Bury Even One's Head Under The Cover, Giving One's Self Up To It Completely, Moaning Like Branches In The Autumn Wind. But There Is Still A Better Bed, Full Of Divine Odors. It Is Our Sweet, Our Profound, Our Impenetrable Friendship.

And So When Studying Faces, We Do Indeed Measure Them, But As Painters, Not As Surveyors.

...the Nose Is Generally The Organ In Which Stupidity Is Most Readily Displayed.

The Heart Does Not Lie.

When We Have Passed A Certain Age, The Soul Of The Child We Were And The Souls Of The Dead From Whom We Have Sprung Come To Lavish On Us Their Riches And Their Spells.

Neurosis Has An Absolute Genius For Malingering. There Is No Illness Which It Cannot Counterfeit Perfectly. If It Is Capable Of Deceiving The Doctor, How Should It Fail To Deceive The Patient

The Most Familiar Precepts Are Not Always The Truest.

So Long As I Know What's Boiling In My Pot I Don't Bother My Head About What's In Other People's.

There Is No Idea That Does Not Carry In Itself A Possible Refutation, No Word That Does Not Imply Its Opposite.

Lies Are Essential To Humanity. They Are Perhaps As Important As The Pursuit Of Pleasure And Moreover Are Dictated By That Pursuit.

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.

We Feel In One World, We Think And Name In Another. Between The Two We Can Set Up A System Of References, But We Cannot Fill In The Gap.

Our Vanity, Our Passions, Our Spirit Of Imitation, Our Abstract Intelligence, Our Habits Have Long Been At Work, And It Is The Task Of Art To Undo This Work Of Theirs, Making Us Travel Back In The Direction From Which We Have Come To The Depths Where What Has Really Existed Lies Unknown Within Us.

A Collection Of Bad Love Songs, Tattered From Overuse, Has To Touch Us Like A Cemetery Or A Village. So What If The Houses Have No Style, If The Graves Are Vanishing Under Tasteless Ornaments And Inscriptions? Before An Imagination Sympathetic And Respectful Enough To Conceal Momentarily Its Aesthetic Disdain, That Dust May Release A Flock Of Souls, Their Beaks Holding The Still Verdant Dreams That Gave Them An Inkling Of The Next World And Let Them Rejoice Or Weep In This World.

What A Profound Significance Small Things Assume When The Woman We Love Conceals Them From Us.

The Truth Has No Need To Be Uttered To Be Made Apparent, And ... One May Perhaps Gather It With More Certainty, Without Waiting For Words And Without Even Taking Any Account Of Them, From Countless Outward Signs, Even From Certain Invisible Phenomena, Analogous In The Sphere Of Human Character To What Atmospheric Changes Are In The Physical World.

The Charms Of The Passing Woman Are Generally In Direct Ratio To The Swiftness Of Our Passage.

Habit Is, Of All The Plants Of Human Growth, The One That Has The Least Need Of Nutritious Soil In Order To Live, And Is The First To Appear On The Most Seemingly Barren Rock.

When One Becomes For An Instant One's Former Self, That Is To Say Different From What One Has Been For Some Time Past, One's Sensibility, Being No Longer Dulled By Habit, Receives From The Slightest Stimulus Vivid Impressions Which Make Everything That Has Preceded Them Fade Into Insignificance, Impressions To Which, Because Of Their Intensity, We Attach Ourselves With The Momentary Enthusiasm Of A Drunkard.

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.

Three-quarters Of The Sicknesses Of Intelligent People Come From Their Intelligence. They Need At Least A Doctor Who Can Understand This Sickness.

...hard People Are Weak People Whom Nobody Wants, And The Strong, Caring Little Whether They Are Wanted Or Not, Have Alone That Meekness Which The Common Herd Mistake For Weakness.

We Only Really Know What Is New, What Suddenly Introduces To Our Sensibility A Change Of Tone Which Strikes Us, That For Which Habit Has Not Yet Substituted Its Pale Fac-similes.

Often It Is Just Lack Of Imagination That Keeps A Man From Suffering Very Much.

Le Style, Pour L'e Crivain Aussi Bien Que Pour Le Peintre, Est Une Question Non De Technique Mais De Vision. For The Writer As Well As For The Painter, Style Is Not A Question Of Technique, But Of Vision.

For, Just As In The Beginning It Is Formed By Desire, So Afterwards Love Is Kept In Existence Only By Painful Anxiety.

The True Paradises Are The Paradises That We Have Lost.

There Are People Whose Faces Assume An Unaccustomed Beauty And Majesty The Moment They Cease To Look Out Of Their Eyes.

Laissons Les Jolies Femmes Aux Hommes Sans Imagination. Leave The Pretty Women For The Men Without Imagination.

The Thirst For Something Other Than What We Have…to Bring Something New, Even If It Is Worse, Some Emotion, Some Sorrow; When Our Sensibility, Which Happiness Has Silenced Like An Idle Harp, Wants To Resonate Under Some Hand, Even A Rough One, And Even If It Might Be Broken By It.

The Bonds That Unite Us To Another Human Being Are Sanctified When He Or She Adopts The Same Point Of View As Ourselves In Judging One Of Our Imperfections.

There's Nothing Like Desire To Prevent The Things One Says From Having Any Resemblance To The Things In One's Mind.

For Although We Know That The Years Pass, That Youth Gives Way To Old Age, That Fortunes And Thrones Crumble (even The Most Solid Among Them) And That Fame Is Transitory, The Manner In Which—by Means Of A Sort Of Snapshot—we Take Cognisance Of This Moving Universe Whirled Along By Time, Has The Contrary Effect Of Immobilising It.

The Real Voyage Of Discovery Consists Not In Seeking New Landscapes, But In Having New Eyes.

A Man Who Falls Straight Into Bed Night After Night, And Ceases To Live Until The Moment When He Wakes And Rises, Will Surely Never Dream Of Making, I Don't Say Great Discoveries, But Even Minor Observations About Sleep. He Scarcely Knows That He Is Asleep. A Little Insomnia Is Not Without Its Value In Making Us Appreciate Sleep, In Throwing A Ray Of Light Upon That Darkness.

The One Thing More Difficult Than Following A Regime Is Keeping From Imposing It On Others.

When I Was Small Child, All That Belonged To Conservative Society Was Fashionable, And No Republicans Were Welcome In The Smartersalons. People Living In Such A Milieu Could Imagine That The Impossibility Of Ever Inviting An "opportunist", Much Less A "radical", Was A Thing That Would Last Forever, Like Gas Lamps And Horse-drawn Omnibuses. But Similar To Kaleidoscopes Turning From Time To Time, Society Successively Places In Various Ways Elements Which Were Thought To Be Immutable And Creates A New Composition.

What An Abyss Of Uncertainty, Whenever The Mind Feels Overtaken By Itself; When It, The Seeker, Is At The Same Time The Dark Region Through Which It Must Go Seeking And Where All Its Equipment Will Avail It Nothing. Seek? More Than That: Create. It Is Face To Face With Something Which Does Not Yet Exist, Which It Alone Can Make Actual, Which It Alone Can Bring Into The Light Of Day.

I Had Long Since Given Up Trying To Extract From A Woman As It Were The Square Root Of Her Unknown Quantity, The Mystery Of Which A Mere Introduction Was Generally Enough To Dispel.

Love Is Not Vain Because It Is Frustrated, But Because It Is Fulfilled. The People We Love Turn To Ashes When We Posess Them.

Love Is A Reciprocal Torture.

Le Bonheur Est Dans L'amour Un E Tat Anormal. In Love, Happiness Is Abnormal.

Like Many Intellectuals, He Was Incapable Of Saying A Simple Thing In A Simple Way.

She Poured Out Swann's Tea, Inquired "lemon Or Cream?" And, On His Answering "cream, Please," Said To Him With A Laugh: "a Cloud!" And As He Pronounced It Excellent, "you See, I Know Just How You Like It." This Tea Had Indeed Seemed To Swann, Just As It Seemed To Her; Something Precious, And Love Has Such A Need To Find Some Justification For Itself, Some Guarantee Of Duration, In Pleasures Which Without It Would Have No Existence And Must Cease With Its Passing.

We Think And Name In One World, We Live And Feel In Another.

Remembrance Of Things Past Is Not Necessarily The Remembrance Of Things As They Were.

Our Worst Fears, Like Our Greatest Hopes, Are Not Outside Our Powers, And We Can Come In The End To Triumph Over The Former And To Achieve The Latter.

Perhaps The Pleasure One Feels In Writing Is Not The Infallible Test Of The Literary Value Of A Page; Perhaps It Is Only A Secondary State Which Is Often Superadded, But The Want Of Which Can Have No Prejudicial Effect On It. Perhaps Some Of The Greatest Masterpieces Were Written While Yawning.

Thanks To Art, Instead Of Seeing One World Only, Our Own, We See That World Multiply Itself And We Have At Our Disposal As Many Worlds As There Are Original Artists, Worlds More Different One From The Other Than Those Which Revolve In Infinite Space, Worlds Which, Centuries After The Extinction Of The Fire From Which Their Light First Emanated, Whether It Is Called Rembrandt Or Vermeer, Send Us Still Each One Its Special Radiance.

Memory Nourishes The Heart, And Grief Abates.

The Sensitiveness Claimed By Neurotic Is Matched By Their Egotism: They Cannot Abide The Flaunting By Others Of The Sufferings To Which They Pay An Even Increasing Amount Of Attention In Themselves.

My Destination Is No Longer A Place, Rather A New Way Of Seeing.

We May Have Revolved Every Possible Idea In Our Minds, And Yet The Truth Has Never Occurred To Us, And It Is From Without, When We Are Least Expecting It, That It Gives Us Its Cruel Stab And Wounds Us Forever.

The Artist Who Gives Up An Hour Of Work For An Hour Of Conversation With A Friend Knows That He Is Sacrificing A Reality For Something That Does Not Exist.

The Character We Exhibit In The Latter Half Of Our Life Need Not Necessarily Be, Though It Often Is, Our Original Character, Developed Further, Dried Up, Exaggerated, Or Diminished. It Can Be Its Exact Opposite, Like A Suit Worn Inside Out.

Habit! That Skilful But Slow-moving Arranger Who Begins By Letting Our Minds Suffer For Weeks On End In Temporary Quarters, But Whom Our Minds Are None The Less Only Too Happy To Discover At Last, For Without It, Reduced To Their Own Devices, They Would Be Powerless To Make Any Room Seem Habitable.

Our Memory Is Like A Shop In The Window Of Which Is Exposed Now One, Now Another Photograph Of The Same Person. And As A Rule The Most Recent Exhibit Remains For Some Time The Only One To Be Seen.

In Reality, In Love There Is A Permanent Suffering Which Joy Neutralizes, Renders Virtual Delays, But Which Can At Any Moment Become What It Would Have Become Long Earlier If One Had Not Obtained What One Wanted -- Atrocious.

Inspirational Love

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.

We Pack The Physical Outline Of The Creature We See With All The Ideas We Have Already Formed About Him, And In The Complete Picture Of Him We Compose In Our Minds Those Ideas Have Certainly The Principal Place.

It Is Always During A Passing State Of Mind That We Make Lasting Resolutions.

People Who Laugh So Heartily At What They Themselves Have Said, When It Is Not Funny, Dispense Us Accordingly, By Taking Upon Themselves The Responsibility For The Mirth, From Joining In It.

The Only True Voyage, The Only Bath In The Fountain Of Youth, Would Be Not To Visit Strange Lands But To Possess Other Eyes, To See The Universe Through The Eyes Of Another, Of A Hundred Others, To See The Hundred Universes That Each Of Them Sees, That Each Of Them Is; And This We Do [with Great Artists]; With Artists Like These We Do Really Fly From Star To Star.

Love Is A Striking Example Of How Little Reality Means To Us.

We Must Never Be Afraid To Go Too Far, For Truth Lies Beyond.

... We Made Much Less Happy By The Kindness Of A Great Writer, Which Strictly Speaking We Find Only In His Books, Than We Suffer From The Hostility Of A Woman Whom We Have Not Chosen For Her Intelligence, But Whom We Cannot Stop Ourselves From Loving.

Theoretically, We Know That The World Turns, But In Fact We Do Not Notice It, The Earth On Which We Walk Does Not Seem To Move Andwe Live On In Peace. This Is How It Is Concerning Time In Our Lives. And To Render Its Passing Perceptible, Novelists Must... Have Their Readers Cross Ten, Twenty, Thirty Years In Two Minutes.

After A Certain Age, The More One Becomes Oneself, The More Obvious One's Family Traits Become.

Sometimes In This Life, Under The Stress Of An Exceptional Emotion, People Do Say What They Think.

How Can We Have The Courage To Wish To Live, How Can We Make A Movement To Preserve Ourselves From Death, In A World Where Love Is Provoked By A Lie And Consists Solely In The Need Of Having Our Sufferings Appeased By Whatever Being Has Made Us Suffer?

A Fashionable Milieu Is One In Which Everybody's Opinion Is Made Up Of The Opinion Of All The Others. Has Everybody A Different Opinion? Then It Is A Literary Milieu.

I Was Left Alone There In The Company Of The Orchids, Roses And Violets, Which, Like People Waiting Beside You Who Do Not Know You, Preserved A Silence Which Their Individuality As Living Things Made All The More Striking, And Warmed Themselves In The Heat Of A Glowing Coal Fire.

Instead Of Seeking New Landscapes, Develop New Eyes.

We Construct Our Lives For One Person, And When At Length It Is Ready To Receive Her That Person Does Not Come; Presently She Is Dead To Us, And We Live On, Prisoners Within The Walls Which Were Intended Only For Her.

The Past Not Merely Is Not Fugitive, It Remains Present.

Illness Is The Doctor To Whom We Pay Most Heed; To Kindness, To Knowledge, We Make Promise Only; Pain We Obey.

Knowing Does Not Always Allow Us To Prevent, But At Least The Things That We Know, We Hold Them, If Not In Our Hands, But At Leastin Our Thoughts Where We May Dispose Of Them At Our Whim, Which Gives Us The Illusion Of Power Over Them.

A Little Tap At The Window, As Though Some Missile Had Struck It, Followed By A Plentiful, Falling Sound, As Light, Though, As If A Shower Of Sand Were Being Sprinkled From A Window Overhead; Then The Fall Spread, Took On An Order, A Rhythm, Became Liquid, Loud, Drumming, Musical, Innumerable, Universal. It Was The Rain

When I Went To Venice I Found That My Dream Had Become-incredibly, But Quite Simply-my Address.

What Barrier Is So Insurmountable As Silence?

Many Years Have Passed Since That Night. The Wall Of The Staircase Up Which I Had Watched The Light Of His Candle Gradually Climb Was Long Ago Demolished. And In Myself, Too, Many Things Have Perished Which I Imagined Would Last For Ever, And New Ones Have Arisen, Giving Birth To New Sorrows And New Joys Which In Those Days I Could Not Have Foreseen, Just As Now The Old Are Hard To Understand.

It Is Only With The Passions Of Others That We Are Ever Really Familiar, And What We Come To Discover About Our Own Can Only Be Learned From Them.

For Every Sin There Is Forgiveness, And Especially For The Sins Of Youth.

The Disinterest [of My Two Great-aunts] In Anything That Had To Do With High Society Was Such That Their Sense Of Hearing ... Put To Rest Its Receptor Organs And Allowed Them To Suffer The True Beginnings Of Atrophy.

It Seems That Certain Transcendental Realities Emit Rays To Which The Masses Are Sensitive. That Is How, For Example, When An Event Takes Place, When At The Front An Army Is In Danger, Or Defeated, Or Victorious, The Rather Obscure News Which The Cultivated Man Does Not Quite Understand, Excite In The Masses An Emotion Which Surprises Him And In Which, Once The Experts Have Informed Him Of The Actual Military Situation, He Recognizes The Populace's Perception Of That "aura" Surrounding Great Events And Visible For Hundreds Of Kilometers.

In Times Like Ours, Where The Growing Complexity Of Life Leaves Us Barely The Time To Read The Newspapers, Where The Map Of Europehas Endured Profound Rearrangements And Is Perhaps On The Brink Of Enduring Yet Others, Where So Many Threatening And New Problems Appear Everywhere, You Will Admit It May Be Demanded Of A Writer That He Be More Than A Fine Wit Who Makes Us Forget In Idle And Byzantine Discussions On The Merits Of Pure Form.

Like A Kaleidoscope Which Is Every Now And Then Given A Turn, Society Arranges Successively In Different Orders Elements Which One Would Have Supposed Immutable, And Composes A New Pattern.

Fashions, Being Themselves Begotten Of The Desire For Change, Are Quick To Change Also.

Unkind People Imagine Themselves To Be Inflicting Pain On Someone Equally Unkind.

How Else Learn The Real, If Not By Inventing What Might Lie Outside It?

As To The Pretty Girls Who Went Past, From The Day On Which I Had First Known That Their Cheeks Could Be Kissed, I Had Become Curious About Their Souls. And The Universe Had Appeared To Me More Interesting.

Nous Sommes Tous Oblige S, Pour Rendre La Re Alite Supportable, D'entretenir En Nous Quelques Petites Folies. We Must All Indulge In A Few Follies If We Are To Make Reality Bearable.

According To A Charming Law Of Nature Which Is Evident Even In The Most Sophisticated Societies, We Live In Complete Ignorance Of Whatever We Love.

Masterpieces Are No More Than The Shipwrecked Flotsam Of Great Minds.

Everything That Seems Imperishable Tends To Extinguishment.

In Love, Happiness Is An Abnormal State.

Perhaps It Is Not-being That Is The True State, And All Our Dream Of Life Is Inexistent; But, If So, We Feel That These Phrases Of Music, These Conceptions Which Exist In Relation To Our Dream, Must Be Nothing Either. We Shall Perish, But We Have As Hostages These Divine Captives Who Will Follow And Share Our Fate. And Death In Their Company Is Somehow Less Bitter, Less Inglorious, Perhaps Even Less Probable.

Certain Favourite Roles Are Played By Us So Often Before The Public And Rehearsed So Carefully When We Are Alone That We Find It Easier To Refer To Their Fictitious Testimony Than To That Of A Reality Which We Have Almost Entirely Forgotten.

We Ought At Least, From Prudence, Never To Speak Of Ourselves, Because That Is A Subject On Which We May Be Sure That Other People's Views Are Never In Accordance With Our Own.

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.

I Do My Intellectual Work Inside Myself, And Once I Am With My Fellow Creatures It Is More Or Less A Matter Of Indifference To Me Whether Or Not They Are Intelligent As Long As They Are Kind, Sincere, Etc.

Wars Are Fought For The Benefit Of Oligarchs, Triumphs Bought With The Blood Of Peons.

Even Though Our Lives Wander, Our Memories Remain In One Place.

The Real Stars Of Society Are Tired Of Appearing There. He Who Is Curious To Gaze At Them Must Often Migrate To Another Hemisphere, Where They Are More Or Less Alone.

The Stellar Universe Is Not So Difficult To Understand As The Real Actions Of Other People, Especially Of The People With Whom We Are In Love.

A Woman One Loves Rarely Suffices For All Our Needs, So We Deceive Her With Another Whom We Do Not Love.

Everything Great In The World Comes From Neurotics. They Alone Have Founded Our Religions And Composed Our Masterpieces.

The Facts Of Life Do Not Penetrate To The Sphere In Which Our Beliefs Are Cherished; They Did Not Engender Those Beliefs, And They Are Powerless To Destroy Them.

Habit! That Skillful But Slow Arranger, Which Starts Out By Letting Our Spirit Suffer For Weeks In A Temporary State, But That Thespirit Is After All Happy To Discover, For Without Habit And Reduced To Its Own Resources, The Spirit Would Be Unable To Make Any Lodgings Seem Habitable.

...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.

La Me Decine A Fait Quelques Petits Progre' S Dans Ses Connaissances Depuis Molie' Re, Mais Aucun Dans Son Vocabulaire. Medicine Has Made A Few, Small Advances In Knowledge Since Molie' R E, But None In Its Vocabulary.

The Memory Of A Particular Image Is But Regret For A Particular Moment.

The Bonds Between Ourselves And Another Person Exists Only In Our Minds. Memory As It Grows Fainter Loosens Them, And Notwithstanding The Illusion By Which We Want To Be Duped And Which, Out Of Love, Friendship, Politeness, Deference, Duty, We Dupe Other People, We Exist Alone. Man Is The Creature Who Cannot Escape From Himself, Who Knows Other People Only In Himself, And When He Asserts The Contrary, He Is Lying.

I Blame The Newspapers Because Every Day They Call Our Attention To Insignificant Things, While Three Or Four Times In Our Lives,we Read Books That Contain Essential Things. Once We Feverishly Tear The Band Of Paper Enclosing Our Newspapers, Things Should Change And We Should Find--i Do Not Know--the Pensées By Pascal!

Insignificant Things

Love...., Ever Unsatisfied, Lives Always In The Moment That Is About To Come.

Aristocracy Is A Relative Thing. And There Are Plenty Of Out-of-the-way Places Where The Son Of An Upholsterer Is The Arbiter Of Fashion And Reigns Over A Court Like Any Young Prince Of Wales.

A Powerful Idea Communicates Some Of Its Power To The Man Who Contradicts It. Partaking Of The Universal Community Of Minds, It Infiltrates, Grafts Itself On To, The Mind Of Him Who It Refutes, Among Other Contiguous Ideas, With The Aid Of Which, Counter-attacking, He Complements And Corrects It; So That The Final Verdict Is Always To Some Extent The Work Of Both Parties To A Discussion.

Sometimes In The Afternoon Sky The Moon Would Pass White As A Cloud, Furtive, Lusterless, Like An Actress Who Does Not Have To Perform Yet And Who, From The Audience, In Street Clothes, Watches The Other Actors For A Moment, Making Herself Inconspicuous, Not Wanting Anyone To Pay Attention To Her.

To A Great Extent, Suffering Is A Sort Of Need Felt By The Organism To Make Itself Familiar With A New State, Which Makes It Uneasy, To Adapt Its Sensibility To That State.

Medicine Being A Compendium Of The Successive And Contradictory Mistakes Of Medical Practitioners, When We Summon The Wisest Of Them To Our Aid, The Chances Are That We May Be Relying On A Scientific Truth The Error Of Which Will Be Recognized In A Few Years Time.

I Believe That All True Art Is Classic, But The Dictates Of The Mind Rarely Permit Of Its Being Recognized As Such When It First Appears.

Truth Is A Point Of View About Things.

... But All The Feelings That Evoke In Us The Joy Or The Misfortune Of A Real Person Are Only Produced In Us Through The Intermediary Of An Image Of That Joy Or That Misfortune; The Ingeniousness Of The First Novelist Was In Understanding That, In The Apparatus Of Our Emotions, Since The Image Is The Only Essential Element, The Simplification Which Consists Of Purely And Simply Suppressing The Factual Characters Is A Definitive Improvement.

A Photograph Acquires Something Of The Dignity Which It Ordinarily Lacks When It Ceases To Be A Reproduction Of Reality And Shows Us Things That No Longer Exist.

People Don't Know When They Are Happy. They're Never So Unhappy As They Think They Are.

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.

Let Us Be Grateful To People Who Make Us Happy.

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