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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.

-Marcel Proust

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Every Reader, As He

Marcel Proust

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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.

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The Human Plagiarism Which Is Most Difficult To Avoid, For Individuals... Is The Plagiarism Of Ourselves.

We Believe We Can Change Things According To Our Wishes Because That's The Only Happy Solution We Can See. We Don't Think Of What Usually Happens And What Is Also A Happy Solution; Things Don't Change, But By And By Our Wishes Change.

Le Temps Qui Change Les E" Tres Ne Modifie Pas L'image Que Nous Avons Garde E D'eux. Although Time Changes People, It Cannot Change The Image We Have Already Made Of Them.

Things Don't Change, But By And By Our Wishes Change.

Our Intellect Is Not The Most Subtle, The Most Powerful, The Most Appropriate, Instrument For Revealing The Truth. It Is Life That, Little By Little, Example By Example, Permits Us To See That What Is Most Important To Our Heart, Or To Our Mind, Is Learned Not By Reasoning But Through Other Agencies. Then It Is That The Intellect, Observing Their Superiority, Abdicates Its Control To Them Upon Reasoned Grounds And Agrees To Become Their Collaborator And Lackey.

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.

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.

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

Facts Do Not Find Their Way Into The World In Which Our Beliefs Reside; They Did Not Produce Our Beliefs, They Do Not Destroy Them; They May Inflict On Them The Most Constant Refutations Without Weakening Them, And An Avalanche Of Afflictions Or Ailments Succeeding One Another Without Interruption In A Family Will Not Make It Doubt The Goodness Of Its God Or The Talent Of Its Doctor.

The Images Selected By Memory Are As Arbitrary, As Narrow, As Elusive As Those Which The Imagination Had Formed And Reality Has Destroyed. There Is No Reason Why, Existing Outside Ourselves, A Real Place Should Conform To The Pictures In Our Memory Rather Than Those In Our Dreams.

The Tiny, Initial Clue ... By Allowing Us To Imagine What We Do Not Know, Stimulates A Desire For Knowledge.

If Only For The Sake Of Elegance, I Try To Remain Morally Pure.

The Highest Praise Of God Consists In The Denial Of Him By The Atheist Who Finds Creation So Perfect That It Can Dispense With A Creator.

Wisdom Cannot Be Imparted. Wisdom That A Wise Man Attempts To Impart Always Sounds Like Foolishness To Someone Else ... Knowledge Can Be Communicated, But Not Wisdom. One Can Find It, Live It, Do Wonders Through It, But One Cannot Communicate And Teach It.” - Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha "we Don't Receive Wisdom; We Must Discover It For Ourselves After A Journey That No One Can Take For Us Or Spare Us From.

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.

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

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 Words Are, As A General Rule, Filled By The People To Whom We Address Them With A Meaning Which Those People Derive From Their Own Substance, A Meaning Widely Different From That Which We Had Put Into The Same Words When We Uttered Them.

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.

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.

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.

Those Whose Suffering Is Due To Love Are, As We Say Of Certain Invalids, Their Own Physicians.

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

Griefs, At The Moment When They Change Into Ideas, Lose Some Of Their Power To Injure Our Heart.

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

It Is Often Hard To Bear The Tears That We Ourselves Have Caused.

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.

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

Perhaps The Immobility Of The Things That Surround Us Is Forced Upon Them By Our Conviction That They Are Themselves, And Not Anything Else, And By The Immobility Of Our Conceptions Of Them.

It Is A Mistake To Speak Of A Bad Choice In Love, Since, As Soon As A Choice Exists, It Can Only Be Bad.

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

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.

When You Work To Please Others You Can't Succeed, But The Things You Do To Satisfy Yourself Stand A Chance Of Catching Someone's Interest.

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

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.

Even The Simple Act That We Call "going To Visit A Person Of Our Acquaintance" Is In Part An Intellectual Act. We Fill The Physical Appearance Of The Person We See With All The Notions We Have About Him, And In The Totality Of Our Impressions About Him, These Notions Play The Most Important Role.

On Devient Moral De' S Qu'on Est Malheureux. We Become Moral Once We Are Miserable.

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

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.

Physical Love, So Unjustly Decried, Forces Everyone To Manifest Even The Smallest Bits Of Kindness He Possesses, Of Selflessness,that They Shine In The Eyes Of All Who Surround Him.

When From A Long Distant Past Nothing Subsists After The Things Are Broken And Scattered, The Smell And Taste Of Things Remain.

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.

When A Belief Vanishes, There Survives It -- More And More Vigorously So As To Cloak The Absence Of The Power, Now Lost To Us, Of Imparting Reality To New Things -- A Fetishistic Attachment To The Old Things Which It Did Once Animate, As If It Was In Them And Not In Ourselves That The Divine Spark Resided, And As If Our Present Incredulity Had A Contingent Cause -- The Death Of The Gods.

A Sleeping Man Holds In A Circle Around Him The Thread Of The Hours, The Order Of Years And Of Worlds. He Consults Them Instinctively Upon Awaking And In One Second Reads In Them The Point Of The Earth That He Occupies, The Time Past Until His Arousal; But Their Ranks Can Be Mingled Or Broken.

If A Little Dreaming Is Dangerous, The Cure For It Is Not To Dream Less But To Dream More, To Dream All The Time.

...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.

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.

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.

A Cathedral, A Wave Of A Storm, A Dancer's Leap, Never Turn Out To Be As High As We Had Hoped.

Error, By Force Of Contrast, Enhances The Triumph Of Truth.

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.

When I Am Not Too Sad To Listen, Music Is My Consolation.

The Loss Of A Sense Adds As Much Beauty To The World As Its Acquisition.

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

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.

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.

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.

I Had Come In Time To Learn That It Was A Mistake To Smile A Friendly Smile When Somebody Made A Fool Of Me.

Not Caring For Their Lives' Is It? Why, What In The World Is There That We Should Care For If It's Not Our Lives, The Only Gift The Lord Never Offers Us A Second Time.

It Comes So Soon, The Moment When There Is Nothing Left To Wait For.

Friendship Is In The End No More Than: " . . . A Lie Which Seeks To Make Us Believe That We Are Not Irremediably Alone."

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.

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

The Particulars Of Life Do Not Matter To The Artist; They Merely Provide Him With The Opportunity To Lay Bare His Genius.

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.

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

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.

The Truth Is That Men Can Have Several Sorts Of Pleasure. The True Pleasure Is The One For Which They Abandon The Other.

A Doctor Who Doesn't Say Too Many Foolish Things Is A Patient Half-cured.

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.

The Creation Of The World Did Not Occur At The Beginning Of Time, It Occurs Every Day.

Creation Of The World

We Have Nothing To Fear And A Great Deal To Learn From Trees, That Vigorours And Pacific Tribe Which Without Stint Produces Strengthening Essences For Us, Soothing Balms, And In Whose Gracious Company We Spend So Many Cool, Silent, And Intimate Hours.

All The Great Things We Know Have Come To Us From Neurotics. It Is They Who Have Founded Religions And Created Great Works Of Art.

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'adolescence Est Le Seul Temps O U' L'on Ait Appris Quelque Chose. Adolescence Is The Only Time When We Can Learn Something.

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

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.

Desire Makes Everything Blossom; Possession Makes Everything Wither And Fade.

The Fixity Of A Habit Is Generally In Direct Proportion To Its Absurdity.

Reading Is That Fruitful Miracle Of A Communication In The Midst Of Solitude.

She's Got Feet Like Boats, Whiskers Like An American, And Her Undies Are Filthy.

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

The Great Quality Of True Art Is That It Rediscovers, Grasps And Reveals To Us That Reality Far From Where We Live, From Which We Get Farther And Farther Away As The Conventional Knowledge We Substitute For It Becomes Thicker And More Impermeable.

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.

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

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 Picture That We Form For Ourselves, These Notions Certainly Occupy The Greater Part.

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.

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

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.

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.

People Who Are Not In Love Fail To Understand How An Intelligent Man Can Suffer Because Of A Very Ordinary Woman. This Is Like Being Surprised That Anyone Should Be Stricken With Cholera Because Of A Creature So Insignificant As The Common Bacillus.

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.

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.

If We Are To Make Reality Endurable, We Must All Nourish A Fantasy Or Two.

All The Mind's Activity Is Easy If It Is Not Subjected To Reality.

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

We Become Moral When We Are Unhappy.

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

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.

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.

The Only Possible Paradises Are Those We Have Lost

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

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

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.

... 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.

How Paradoxical It Is To Search Reality For The Pictures That Are Stored In One's Memory.

I Wished To See Storms Only On Those Coasts Where They Raged With Most Violence.

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

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

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.

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.

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 Pensées In An Advertisement For Soap.

If, I Can Someday See M. Claude Monet's Garden, I Feel Sure That I Shall See Something That Is Not So Much A Garden Of Flowers As Of Colours And Tones, Less An Old-fashioned Flower Garden Than A Colour Garden, So To Speak, One That Achieves An Effect Not Entirely Nature's, Because It Was Planted So That Only The Flowers With Matching Colours Will Bloom At The Same Time, Harmonized In An Infinite Stretch Of Blue Or Pink.

Let Us Be Grateful To People Who Make Us Happy, They Are The Charming Gardeners Who Make Our Souls Blossom.

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

Human Altruism Which Is Not Egoism, Is Sterile.

Humanitarianism

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.

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.

... 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.

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.

There Is No Man ... However Wise, Who Has Not At Some Period Of His Youth Said Things, Or Lived A Life, The Memory Of Which Is So Unpleasant To Him That He Would Gladly Expunge It. And Yet He Ought Not Entirely To Regret It, Because He Cannot Be Certain That He Has Indeed Become A Wise Man -- So Far As It Is Possible For Any Of Us To Be Wise -- Unless He Has Passed Through All The Fatuous Or Unwholesome Incarnations By Which That Ultimate Stage Must Be Preceded.

Only By Art Can We Get Outside Ourselves, Instead Of Seeing Only One World, Our Own, We See It Under Multiple Forms.

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.

The Truth Is That Every Morning War Is Declared Afresh. And The Men Who Wish To Continue It Are As Guilty As The Men Who Began It, More Guilty Perhaps, For The Latter Perhaps Did Not Foresee All Its Horrors.

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.

For Neither Our Greatest Fears Nor Our Greatest Hopes Are Beyond The Limits Of Our Strength--we Are Able In The End Both To Dominate The First And To Achieve The Second.

We Do Not Receive Wisdom, We Must Discover It For Ourselves, After A Journey Through The Wilderness Which No One Else Can Make For Us, Which No One Can Spare Us, For Our Wisdom Is The Point Of View From Which We Come At Last To Regard The World. The Lives That You Admire, The Attitudes That Seem Noble To You, Have Not Been Shaped By A Paterfamilias Or A Schoolmaster, They Have Sprung From Very Different Beginnings, Having Been Influenced By Evil Or Commonplace That Prevailed Round Them. They Represent A Struggle And A Victory.

The Most Familiar Precepts Are Not Always The Truest.

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.

This Labour Of The Artist To Discover A Means Of Apprehending Beneath Matter And Experience, Beneath Words, Something Different From Their Appearance, Is Of An Exactly Contrary Nature To The Operation In Which Pride, Passion, Intelligence And Habit Are Constantly Engaged Within Us When We Spend Our Lives Without Self-communion, Accumulating As Though To Hide Our True Impressions, The Terminology For Practical Ends Which We Falsely Call Life.

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.

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.

Love Is Space And Time Measured By The Heart.

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.

Time Passes, And Little By Little Everything That We Have Spoken In Falsehood Becomes True.

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 Love Only What We Do Not Wholly Possess.

To Write That Essential Book, A Great Writer Does Not Need To Invent It But Merely To Translate It, Since It Already Exists In Each One Of Us. The Duty And Task Of A Writer Are Those Of Translator.

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.

Dear Friend: I Have Nearly Died Three Times Since Morning.

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.

The Inertia Of The Mind Urges It To Slide Down The Easy Slope Of Imagination, Rather Than To Climb The Steep Slope Of Introspection.

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.

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.

Let But A Single Flash Of Reality -- The Glimpse Of A Woman From Afar Or From Behind -- Enable Us To Project The Image Of Beauty Before Our Eyes, And We Imagine That We Have Recognised It, Our Hearts Beat, And We Will Always Remain Half-persuaded That It Was She, Provided That The Woman Has Vanished: It Is Only If We Manage To Overtake Her That We Realise Our Mistake.

Our Shadows, Now Parallel, Now Close Together And Joined, Traced An Exquisite Pattern At Our Feet.

The Time At Our Disposal Each Day Is Elastic; The Passions We Feel Dilate It, Those That Inspire Us Shrink It, And Habit Fills It.

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.

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

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

There Was Nothing Abnormal About It When Homosexuality Was The Norm.

Normal And Abnormal

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.

Love Is An Incurable Malady Like Those Pathetic States In Which Rheumatism Affords The Sufferer A Brief Respite Only To Be Replaced By Epileptiform Headaches.

We Do Not Succeed In Changing Things According To Our Desire, But Gradually Our Desire Changes. The Situation That We Hoped To Change Because It Was Intolerable Becomes Unimportant. We Have Not Managed To Surmount The Obstacle, As We Were Absolutely Determined To Do, But Life Has Taken Us Round It, Led Us Past It, And Then If We Turn Round To Gaze At The Remote Past, We Can Barely Catch Sight Of It, So Imperceptible Has It Become.

But Sometimes Illumination Comes To Our Rescue At The Very Moment When All Seems Lost; We Have Knocked At Every Door And They Open On Nothing Until, At Last, We Stumble Unconsciously Against The Only One Through Which We Can Enter The Kingdom We Have Sought In Vain A Hundred Years - And It Opens.

My Dear Madame, I Just Noticed That I Forgot My Cane At Your House Yesterday; Please Be Good Enough To Give It To The Bearer Of This Letter. P.s. Kindly Pardon Me For Disturbing You; I Just Found My Cane.

The Features Of Our Face Are Hardly More Than Gestures Which Force Of Habit Made Permanent. Nature, Like The Destruction Of Pompeii, Like The Metamorphosis Of A Nymph Into A Tree, Has Arrested Us In An Accustomed Movement.

Perfume Is That Last And Best Reserve Of The Past, The One Which When All Out Tears Have Run Dry, Can Make Us Cry Again!

Man Is The Creature That Cannot Emerge From Himself, That Knows His Fellows Only In Himself; When He Asserts The Contrary, He Is Lying.

There Is In This World In Which Everything Wears Out, Everything Perishes, One Thing That Crumbles Into Dust, That Destroys Itself Still More Completely, Leaving Behind Still Fewer Traces Of Itself Than Beauty: Namely Grief.

...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.

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.

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.

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

In The Sort Of Screen Dappled With Different States Of Mind Which My Consciousness Would Simultaneously Unfold While I Read, And Which Ranged From The Aspirations Hidden Deepest Within Me To The Completely Exterior Vision Of The Horizon Which I Had, At The Bottom Of The Garden, Before My Eyes, What Was First In Me, Innermost, The Constantly Moving Handle That Controlled The Rest, Was My Belief In The Philosophical Richness And Beauty Of The Book I Was Reading, And My Desire To Appropriate Them For Myself, Whatever That Book Might Be.

It Is Not Because Other People Are Dead That Our Affection For Them Grows Faint, It Is Because We Ourselves Are Dying.

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.

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.

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.

Even In The Most Insignificant Details Of Our Daily Life, None Of Us Can Be Said To Constitute A Material Whole, Which Is Identical For Everyone, And Need Only Be Turned Up Like A Page In An Account-book Or The Record Of A Will; Our Social Personality Is Created By The Thoughts Of Other People.

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.

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

Under Each Station Of The Real, Another Glimmers.

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.

With One Image He Would Make That Beauty Explode Into Me.

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.

Everything That Seems Imperishable Tends To Extinguishment.

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

A Language Which We Do Not Know Is A Fortress Sealed.

A Picture's Beauty Does Not Depend On The Things Portrayed In It.

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.

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.

If There Is One Thing More Difficult Than Submitting Oneself To A Regime It Is Refraining From Imposing It On Other People.

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.

Pour E Crire Ce Livre Essentiel, Le Seul Livre Vrai, Un Grand E Crivain N'a Pas, Dans Le Sens Courant, A' L'inventer Puisqu'il Existe De J A' En Chacun De Nous, Mais A' Le Traduire. To Write The Essential Book, The Only True Book, A Great Writerdoesnot Needto Invent Becausethebook Already Exists Inside Each One Of Us And Merely Needs Translation.

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.

Death Is In Truth An Illness From Which We Recover

People Do Not Die For Us Immediately, But Remain Bathed In A Sort Of Aura Of Life Which Bears No Relation To True Immortality But Through Which They Continue To Occupy Our Thoughts In The Same Way As When They Were Alive. It Is As Though They Were Traveling Abroad.

For What We Suppose To Be Our Love Or Our Jealousy Is Never A Single, Continuous And Indivisible Passion. It Is Composed Of An Infinity Of Successive Loves, Of Different Jealousies, Each Of Which Is Ephemeral, Although By Their Uninterrupted Multiplicity They Give Us The Impression Of Continuity, The Illusion Of Unity.

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

Reality Is Never More Than A First Step Towards An Unknown On The Road To Which One Can Never Progress Very Far.

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.

When The Mind Has A Tendency To Dream, It Is A Mistake To Keep Dreams Away From It, To Ration Its Dreams. So Long As You Distract Your Mind From Its Dreams, It Will Not Know Them For What They Are; You Will Always Be Being Taken In By The Appearance Of Things, Because You Will Not Have Grasped Their True Nature. If A Little Dreaming Is Dangerous, The Cure For It Is Not To Dream Less But To Dream More, To Dream All The Time. One Must Have A Thorough Understanding Of One

The Heart Does Not Lie.

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.

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

Illness Is The Most Heeded Of Doctors: To Goodness And Wisdom We Only Make Promises; Pain We Obey.

There Is No More Ridiculous Custom Than The One That Makes You Express Sympathy Once And For All On A Given Day To A Person Whose Sorrow Will Endure As Long As His Life. Such Grief, Felt In Such A Way Is Always Present, It Is Never Too Late To Talk About It, Never Repetitious To Mention It Again.

People Who, Not Being In Love Themselves, Feel That A Clever Man Should Only Be Unhappy About A Person Who Is Worth His While; Which Is Rather Like Being Astonished That Anyone Should Condescend To Die Of Cholera At The Bidding Of So Insignificant A Creature As The Comma Bacillus.

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