Background Image

...

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.

-Marcel Proust

...

Please Wait....
Translating....

For Each Illness That

Marcel Proust

...

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.

Views: 8

Topic

More From Marcel Proust

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.

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

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.

We Become Moral When We Are Unhappy.

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

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

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 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.

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

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.

A Work In Which There Are Theories Is Like An Object Which Still Has The Ticket That Shows Its Price.

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.

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.

Instead Of Seeking New Landscapes, Develop New Eyes.

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.

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.

Truth Is A Point Of View About Things.

That Which We Remember Of Our Conduct Is Ignored By Our Closest Neighbour; But That Which We Have Forgotten Having Said, Or Even What We Never Said, Will Cause Laughter Even Into The Next World.

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

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

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

Memory Nourishes The Heart, And Grief Abates.

True Variety Is In That Plenitude Of Real And Unexpected Elements, In The Branch Charged With Blue Flowers Thrusting Itself, Against All Expectations, From The Springtime Hedge Which Seems Already Too Full, While The Purely Formal Imitation Of Varietyis But Void And Uniformity, That Is, That Which Is Most Opposed To Variety.

We Do Not Succeed In Changing Things According To Our Desire, But Gradually Our Desire Changes.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

There Are Perhaps No Days Of Our Childhood We Lived So Fully As Those We Spent With A Favorite Book.

Unhappy Childhood

That Abominable And Sensual Act Called Reading The Newspaper, Thanks To Which All The Misfortunes And Cataclysms In The Universe Over The Last Twenty-four Hours, The Battles Which Cost The Lives Of Fifty-thousand Men, The Murders, The Strikes, The Bankruptcies, The Fires, The Poisonings, The Suicides, The Divorces, The Cruel Emotions Of Statesmen And Actors, Are Transformed For Us, Who Don't Even Care, Into A Morning Treat, Blending In Wonderfully, In A Particularly Exciting And Tonic Way, With The Recommended Ingestion Of A Few Sips Of Cafe Au Lait.

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

It Is Not Only By Dint Of Lying To Others, But Also Of Lying To Ourselves, That We Cease To Notice That We Are Lying.

Happiness Serves Hardly Any Other Purpose Than To Make Unhappiness Possible.

I Was Not At All Worried About Finding My Doctor Boring; I Expected From Him, Thanks To An Art Of Which The Laws Escaped Me, That He Pronounce Concerning My Health An Indisputable Oracle By Consulting My Entrails.

No Doubt Very Few People Understand The Purely Subjective Nature Of The Phenomenon That We Call Love, Or How It Creates, So To Speak, A Supplementary Person, Distinct From The Person Whom The World Knows By The Same Name, A Person Most Of Whose Constituent Elements Are Derived From Ourselves.

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

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.

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

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.

Everything We Think Of As Great Has Come To Us From Neurotics. It Is They And They Alone Who Found Religions And Create Great Works Of Art. The World Will Never Realize How Much It Owes To Them And What They Have Suffered In Order To Bestow Their Gifts On It.

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.

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

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.

There Is No Man, However Wise, Who Has Not At Some Period Of His Youth Said Things, Or Lived In A Way The Consciousness Of Which Is So Unpleasant To Him In Later Life That He Would Gladly, If He Could, Expunge It From His Memory.

Adultery Breathes New Life Into Marriages Which Have Been Left For Dead.

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

There Are Optical Illusions In Time As Well As Space.

Optical Illusions

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 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

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

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.

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

Under Each Station Of The Real, Another Glimmers.

There Is Not A Woman In The World The Possession Of Whom Is As Precious As That Of The Truths Which She Reveals To Us By Causing Us To Suffer.

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.

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.

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.

The Bonds That Unite Another Person To Our Self Exist Only In Our Mind.

We Were Resigned To Suffering, Thinking That We Loved Outside Ourselves, And We Perceive That Our Love Is A Function Of Our Sorrow, That Our Love Perhaps Is Our Sorrow.

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

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

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.

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 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.

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

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

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

Existence Is Of Little Interest Save On Days When The Dust Of Realities Is Mingled With Magic Sand.

Now Are The Woods All Black, But Still The Sky Is Blue.

... 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.

As Soon As He Ceased To Be Mad He Became Merely Stupid. There Are Maladies We Must Not Seek To Cure Because They Alone Protect Us From Others That Are More Serious.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

In Theory One Is Aware That The Earth Revolves, But In Practice One Does Not Perceive It, The Ground Upon Which One Treads Seems Not To Move, And One Can Live Undisturbed. So It Is With Time In One's Life.

The Paradoxes Of Today Are The Prejudices Of Tomorrow, Since The Most Benighted And The Most Deplorable Prejudices Have Had Their Moment Of Novelty When Fashion Lent Them Its Fragile Grace.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

What Barrier Is So Insurmountable As Silence?

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

Just As Those Who Practice The Same Profession Recognize Each Other Instinctively, So Do Those Who Practice The Same Vice.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

Proust Was The Greatest Novelist Of The Twentieth Century, Just As Tolstoy Was In The Nineteenth.

The Places We Have Known Do Not Belong Solely To The World Of Space In Which We Situate Them For Our Greater Convenience. They Were Only A Thin Slice Among Contiguous Impressions Which Formed Our Life At That Time; The Memory Of A Certain Image Is But Regret For A Certain Moment; And Houses, Roads, Avenues Are As Fleeting, Alas, As The Years.

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.

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.

It's Odd How A Person Always Arouses Admiration For His Moral Qualities Among The Relatives Of Another With Whom He Has Sexual Relations. Physical Love, So Unjustifiably Decried, Makes Everyone Show, Down To The Least Detail, All He Has Of Goodness And Self-sacrifice, So That He Shines Even In The Eyes Of Those Nearest To Him.

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.

But When From A Long-distant Past Nothing Subsists, After The People Are Dead, After The Things Are Broken And Scattered, Taste And Smell Alone, More Fragile But More Enduring, More Unsubstantial, More Persistent, More Faithful, Remain Poised A Long Time, Like Souls, Remembering, Waiting, Hoping, Amid The Ruins Of All The Rest; And Bear Unflinchingly, In The Tiny And Almost Impalpable Drop Of Their Essence, The Vast Structure Of Recollection.

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.

The Opinions Which We Hold Of One Another, Our Relations With Friends And Kinsfolk Are In No Sense Permanent, Save In Appearance, But Are As Eternally Fluid As The Sea Itself.

The 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.

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.

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.

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?

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

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

Through Art Alone Are We Able To Emerge From Ourselves, To Know What Another Person Sees Of A Universe Which Is Not The Same As Our Own And Of Which, Without Art, The Landscapes Would Remain As Unknown To Us As Those That May Exist On The Moon.

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.

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

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

For Theories And Schools, Like Microbes And Corpuscles, Devour One Another And By Their Strife Ensure The Continuity Of Life.

Continuity Of Life

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.

Time, Which Changes People, Does Not Alter The Image We Have Retained Of Them.

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.

A Man Of Letters, Merely By Reading A Phrase, Can Estimate Exactly The Literary Merit Of Its Author.

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.

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.

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.

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

For Women Who Do Not Love Us, As For The "disappeared", Knowing That We No Longer Have Any Hope Does Not Prevent Us Form Continuing To Wait. We Live On Our Guard, On Watch; Women Whose Son Has Gone Asea On A Dangerous Exploration Imagine At Any Minute, Although It Has Long Been Certain That He Has Perished, That He Will Enter, Miraculously Saved, And Healthy.

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.

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

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.

Death Is In Truth An Illness From Which We Recover

The Most Powerful Soporific Is Sleep Itself.

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.

L'adulte' Re Introduit L'esprit Dans La Lettre Quebien Souvent Le Mariage E U" T Laisse E Morte. Adultery Breathes New Life Into Marriages Which Have Been Left For Dead.

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.

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.

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

Creation Of The World

They Like My Books Better In England Than In France; A Translation Would Be Very Successful There.

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.

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.

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.

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

... 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.

The Heart Does Not Lie.

...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.

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.

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 Always!

I Have A Horror Of Sunsets; They're So Romantic, So Operatic.

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.

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.

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.

The Reason Why A Work Of Genius Is Not Easily Admired From The First Is That The Man Who Has Created It Is Extraordinary, That Few Other Men Resemble Him. It Is His Work Itself That, By Fertilising The Rare Minds Capable Of Understanding It, Will Make Them Increase And Multiply.

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.

For One Cannot Change, That Is To Say Become Another Person, While Continuing To Acquiesce To The Feelings Of The Person One No Longer Is.

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.

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.

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.

The True Paradises Are The Paradises That We Have Lost.

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

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

One Reads The Papers As One Wants To With A Bandage Over One's Eyes Without Trying To Understand The Facts, Listening To The Soothing Words Of The Editor As To The Words Of One S Mistress.

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.

There Are Mountainous, Arduous Days, Up Which One Takes An Infinite Time To Climb, And Downward-sloping Days Which One Can Descend At Full Tilt, Singing As One Goes.

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.

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

Let Us Be Grateful To People Who Make Us Happy.

Conversation, Which Is Friendship's Mode Of Expression, Is A Superficial Digression Which Gives Us Nothing Worth Acquiring. We May Talk For A Lifetime Without Doing More Than Indefinitely Repeat The Vacuity Of A Minute.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Photography Is The Product Of Complete Alienation.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Human Altruism Which Is Not Egoism, Is Sterile.

Humanitarianism

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

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

The Duty And The Task Of A Writer Are Those Of An Interpreter.

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.

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

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

The Only Paradise Is Paradise Lost.

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.

Trending Author

Simone Signoret

Joseph P. Kennedy III

William Falconer

Zelda Fitzgerald

Pierre De Fermat

Category