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For Everyone Who, Having No Artistic Sense-that Is To Say, No Submission To Subjective Reality-may Have The Knack Of Reasoning About Art Till Doomsday, Especially If He Be, In Addition, A Diplomat Or Financier In Contact With The 'realities' Of The Present Day, Is Only Too Ready To Believe Literature Is An Intellectual Game Which Is Destined To Gradually Be Abandoned As Time Goes On.

-Marcel Proust

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For Everyone Who, Having

Marcel Proust

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For Everyone Who, Having No Artistic Sense-that Is To Say, No Submission To Subjective Reality-may Have The Knack Of Reasoning About Art Till Doomsday, Especially If He Be, In Addition, A Diplomat Or Financier In Contact With The 'realities' Of The Present Day, Is Only Too Ready To Believe Literature Is An Intellectual Game Which Is Destined To Gradually Be Abandoned As Time Goes On.

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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.

We Can Sometimes Find A Person Again, But We Cannot Abolish Time. And So On Until The Unforeseen Day, Gloomy As A Winter Night, When One No Longer Seeks That Girl, Or Any Other, When To Find Her Would Actually Scare One. For One No Longer Feels That One Has Attractions Enough To Please, Or Strength Enough To Love. Not, Of Course, That One Is In The Strict Sense Of The Word Impotent. And As For Loving, One Would Love More Than Ever. But One Feels That It Is Too Big An Undertaking For The Little Strength One Has Left.

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.

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.

The Heart Does Not Lie.

Let Us Leave Pretty Women To Men Devoid Of Imagination.

But,instead Of What Our Imagination Makes Us Suppose And Which We Worthless Try To Discover,life Gives Us Something That We Could Hardly Imagine.

Everybody Calls "clear" Those Ideas Which Have The Same Degree Of Confusion As His Own.

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.

One Becomes Moral As Soon As One Is Unhappy.

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.

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.

We Are All Of Us Obliged, If We Are To Make Reality Endurable, To Nurse A Few Little Follies In Ourselves.

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.

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

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?

Your Soul Is A Dark Forest. But The Trees Are Of A Particular Species, They Are Genealogical Trees.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Memory Nourishes The Heart, And Grief Abates.

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.

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.

...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.

Certainly, It Is More Reasonable To Devote One's Life To Women Than To Postage Stamps Or Old Snuff-boxes, Even To Pictures Or Statues. But The Example Of Other Collections Should Be A Warning To Us To Diversify, To Have Not One Woman Only But Several.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Our Desires Cut Across One Another, And In This Confused Existence It Is Rare For Happiness To Coincide With The Desire That Clamoured For It.

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

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 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.

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.

Let Us Be Grateful To People Who Make Us Happy.

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.

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.

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.

May You Always See A Blue Sky Overhead, My Young Friend; And Then, Even When The Time Comes, As It Has Come For Me Now, When The Woods Are Black, When Night Is Fast Falling, You Will Be Able To Console Yourself, As I Do, By Looking Up At The Sky.

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

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

No Man Is A Complete Mystery Except To Himself.

We Exist Only By Virtue Of What We Possess, We Possess Only What Is Really Present To Us, And Many Of Our Memories, Our Moods, Our Ideas Sail Away On A Voyage Of Their Own Until They Are Lost To Sight! Then We Can No Longer Take Them Into Account In The Total Which Is Our Personality. But They Know Of Secret Paths By Which To Return To Us.

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

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.

Thanks To Art, Instead Of Seeing One World, Our Own, We See It Multiplied And As Many Original Artists As There Are, So Many Worlds Are At Our Disposal.

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

Desire Makes Everything Blossom

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

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

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?

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.

All Our Final Decisions Are Made In A State Of Mind That Is Not Going To Last.

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

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.

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.

At The Heart Of Our Friendly Or Purely Social Relations, There Lurks A Hostility Momentarily Cured But Recurring By Fits And Starts.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 Heart Changes...but We Learn Of It Only From Reading Or By Imagination; For In Reality Its Alteration, Like That Of Certain Natural Phenomena, Is So Gradual That, Even If We Are Able To Distinguish, Successively, Each Of Its Different States, We Are Still Spared The Actual Sensation Of Change.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Love Is Space And Time Measured By The Heart.

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

Creation Of The World

... In Love, Barriers Cannot Be Destroyed From The Outside By The One To Whom The Cause Despair, No Matter What He Does; And It Isonly When He Is No Longer Concerned With Them That, Suddenly, As A Result Of Work Coming From Elsewhere, Accomplished Within The One Who Did Not Love Him, These Barriers, Formerly Attacked Without Success, Fall Futilely.

...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.

This Dim Coolness Of My Room Was To The Broad Daylight Of The Street What The Shadow Is To The Sunbeam, That Is To Say Equally Luminous, And Presented To My Imagination The Entire Panorama Of Summer, Which My Senses, If I Had Been Out Walking, Could Have Tasted And Enjoyed Only Piecemeal; And So It Was Quite In Harmony With My State Of Repose Which (thanks To The Enlivening Adventures Related In My Books) Sustained, Like A Hand Reposing Motionless In A Stream Of Running Water, The Shock And Animation Of A Torrent Of Activity.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

So We Don't Believe That Life Is Beautiful Because We Don't Recall It But If We Get A Whiff Of A Long-forgotten Smell We Are Suddenly Intoxicated And Similarly We Think We No Longer Love The Dead Because We Don't Remember Them But If By Chance We Come Across An Old Glove We Burst Into Tears.

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 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.

... 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 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.

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

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.

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.

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

It Is Always Thus, Impelled By A State Of Mind Which Is Destined Not To Last, We Make Our Irrevocable Decisions

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

I Understood That All The Material Of A Literary Work Was In My Past Life, I Understood That I Had Acquired It In The Midst Of Frivolous Amusements, In Idleness, In Tenderness And In Pain, Stored Up By Me Without My Divining Its Destination Or Even Its Survival, As The Seed Has In Reserve All The Ingredients Which Will Nourish The Plant.

We Love Only What We Do Not Wholly Possess.

An Hour Or So Later He Received A Note From Odette. Swann Had Left His Cigarette Case At Her House. "if Only," She Wrote, "you Had Also Forgotten Your Heart! I Should Never Have Let You Have It Back.

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.

The Only True Voyage Of Discovery, . . . Would Be Not To Visit Strange Lands But To Possess Other Eyes.

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

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.

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.

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!

Always Try To Keep A Patch Of Sky Above Your Life.

I Drank A Second Mouthful In Which I Find Nothing More Than In The First, Then A Third Which Gives Me Rather Less Than The Second. It Is Time To Stop; The Potion Is Losing Its Magic.

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

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.

She Was "a Woman Of Uncertain Age.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

The Only Paradise Is Paradise Lost.

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

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.

We Shall See Later On That The Diversity Of The Forms Of Death That Circulate Invisibly Is The Cause Of The Peculiar Unexpectedness Of Obituary Notices In The Newspapers.

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.

To Understand A Profound Thought Is To Have, At The Moment One Understands It, A Profound Thought Oneself; And This Demands Some Effort, A Genuine Descent To The Heart Of Oneself . . . Only Desire And Love Give Us The Strength To Make This Effort. The Only Books That We Truly Absorb Are Those We Read With Real Appetite, After Having Worked Hard To Get Them, So Great Had Been Our Need Of Them.

A Change In The Weather Is Sufficient To Recreate The World And Ourselves.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

Reading Is At The Threshold Of Spiritual Life; It Can Introduce Us To It; It Does Not Constitute It. There Are, However, Certain Cases, Certain Pathological Cases, So To Speak, Of Spiritual Depression In Which Reading Can Become A Sort Of Curative Discipline And Assume The Task, Through Repeated Stimulation, Of Continuously Reintroducing A Lazy Mind Into The Life Of The Spirit.

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

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.

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.

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

Love Is A Reciprocal Torture.

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.

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.

The Sight Of The Little Madeleine Had Recalled Nothing To My Mind Before I Tasted It...

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.

There Are Optical Illusions In Time As Well As Space.

Optical Illusions

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 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.

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.

Human Altruism Which Is Not Egoism, Is Sterile.

Humanitarianism

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.

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.

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

The True Paradises Are The Paradises That We Have Lost.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Any Mental Activity Is Easy If It Need Not Be Subjected To Reality.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

We May, Indeed, Say That The Hour Of Death Is Uncertain, But When We Say This We Think Of That Hour As Situated In A Vague And Remote Expanse Of Time; It Does Not Occur To Us That It Can Have Any Connexion With The Day That Has Already Dawned And Can Mean That Death -- Or Its First Assault And Partial Possession Of Us, After Which It Will Never Leave Hold Of Us Again -- May Occur This Very Afternoon, So Far From Uncertain, This Afternoon Whose Time-table, Hour By Hour, Has Been Settled In Advance.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

In His Younger Days A Man Dreams Of Possessing The Heart Of The Woman Whom He Loves; Later, The Feeling That He Possesses The Heart Of A Woman May Be Enough To Make Him Fall In Love With Her.

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.

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.

We Say That The Hour Of Death Cannot Be Forecast, But When We Say This We Imagine That Hour As Placed In An Obscure And Distant Future. It Never Occurs To Us That It Has Any Connection With The Day Already Begun Or That Death Could Arrive This Same Afternoon, This Afternoon Which Is So Certain And Which Has Every Hour Filled In Advance.

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.

No Days, Perhaps, Of All Our Childhood Are Ever So Fully Lived As Those That We Had Regarded As Not Being Lived At All: Days Spent Wholly With A Favourite Book. Everything That Seemed To Fill Them Full For Others We Pushed Aside, Because It Stood Between Us And The Pleasures Of The Gods.

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.

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