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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.

-Marcel Proust

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Having A Body Is

Marcel Proust

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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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

You Can't Learn The Truth About A Man's Intentions By Asking Him.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

A Powerful Idea Communicates Some Of Its Strength To Him Who Challenges It.

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.

Our Passions Shape Our Books, Repose Writes Them In The Intervals.

The Heart Does Not Lie.

The Artist Who Gives Up An Hour Of Work For An Hour Of Conversation With A Friend Knows That He Is Sacrificing A Reality For Something That Does Not Exist (our Friends Being Friends Only In The Light Of An Agreeable Folly Which Travels With Us Through Life And To Which We Readily Accommodate Ourselves, But Which At The Bottom Of Our Hearts We Know To Be No More Reasonable Than The Delusion Of The Man Who Talks To The Furniture Because He Believes That It Is Alive.).

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.

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

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.

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

The 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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

Everything That Seems Imperishable Tends To Extinguishment.

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.

One Must Never Miss An Opportunity Of Quoting Things By Others Which Are Always More Interesting Than Those One Thinks Up Oneself.

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.

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.

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

To The Pure All Things Are Pure!

Confidence In Others

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

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.

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 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.

Nine Tenths Of The Ills From Which Intelligent People Suffer Spring From Their Intellect.

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.

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.

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

It Is Desire That Engenders Belief And If We Fail As A Rule To Take This Into Account, It Is Because Most Of The Desires That Create Beliefs End Only With Our Own Life.

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.

Desire Makes Everything Blossom

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

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

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

We Live Not Alone But Chained To A Creature Of A Different Kingdom: Our Body.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

I Should Have Been Happy: I Wasn’t.

Should Have Been

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

People Wish To Learn To Swim And At The Same Time To Keep One Foot On The Ground.

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

Le Veritable Voyage De Decouverte Ne Consiste Pas A Chercher De Nouveaux Paysages, Mais A Avoir De Nouveaux Yeux. (the Real Voyage Of Discovery Consists Not In Seeking New Landscapes But In Having New Eyes.)

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

These Dreams Reminded Me That, Since I Wished Some Day To Become A Writer, It Was High Time To Decide What Sort Of Books I Was Going To Write. But As Soon As I Asked Myself The Question, And Tried To Discover Some Subject To Which I Could Impart A Philosophical Significance Of Infinite Value, My Mind Would Stop Like A Clock, My Consciousness Would Be Faced With A Blank, I Would Feel Either That I Was Wholly Devoid Of Talent Or Perhaps That Some Malady Of The Brain Was Hindering Its Development.

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.

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

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

We Strive All The Time To Give Our Life Its Form, But We Do So By Copying Willy-nilly, Like A Drawing, The Features Of The Person That We Are And Not Of The Person We Should Like To Be.

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.

Let Us Leave Pretty Women To Men Devoid Of Imagination.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Let A Prize Lower My Position, If It Causes Me To Be Read; That I Prefer Immediately To All The Honors.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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!

She Was "a Woman Of Uncertain Age.

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

The Most Familiar Precepts Are Not Always The Truest.

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

... 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.

... 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.

...that Melancholy Which We Feel When We Cease To Obey Orders Which, From One Day To Another, Keep The Future Hidden, And Realise That We Have At Last Begun To Live In Real Earnest, As A Grown-up Person, The Life, The Only Life That Any Of Us Has At His Disposal.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

We Scornfully Decline, Because Of One Whom We Love And Who Will Some Day Be Of So Little Account, To See Another Who Is Of No Account To-day, With Whom We Shall Be In Love To-morrow, With Whom We Might, Perhaps, Had We Consented To See Her Now, Have Fallen In Love A Little Earlier And Who Would Thus Have Put A Term To Our Present Sufferings, Bringing Others, It Is True, In Their Place.

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.

... 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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

No Man Is A Complete Mystery Except To Himself.

Human Altruism Which Is Not Egoism, Is Sterile.

Humanitarianism

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

It Is In Moments Of Illness That We Are Compelled To Recognize That We Live Not Alone But Chained To A Creature Of A Different Kingdom, Whole Worlds Apart, Who Has No Knowledge Of Us And By Whom It Is Impossible To Make Ourselves Understood: Our Body.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

...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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Beautiful Books Are Always Written In A Sort Of Foreign Language.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Instead Of Seeking New Landscapes, Develop New Eyes.

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

Let Us Be Grateful To People Who Make Us Happy.

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

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.

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

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.

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