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

-Marcel Proust

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I Shall Not Find

Marcel Proust

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

There Is Probably Not One Person, However Great His Virtue, Who Cannot Be Led By The Complexities Of Life's Circumstances To A Familiarity With The Vices He Condemns The Most Vehemently--without His Completely Recognizing This Vice Which, Disguised As Certain Events, Touches Him And Wounds Him: Strange Words, An Inexplicable Attitude, On A Given Night, Of The Person Whom He Otherwise Has So Many Reasons To Love.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

We Must Love Men More Than Things, And I Admire And Weep More For The Soldiers Than For The Churches Which Were Only The Recording Of An Heroic Gesture Which Today Is Reenacted At Every Moment.

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

Human Altruism Which Is Not Egoism, Is Sterile.

Humanitarianism

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 True Paradises Are The Paradises That We Have Lost.

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

Love Is Space And Time Measured By The Heart.

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.

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.

What Barrier Is So Insurmountable As Silence?

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

Let Us Be Grateful To People Who Make Us Happy.

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

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.

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

...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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

Happiness Is Beneficial For The Body, But It Is Grief That Develops The Powers Of The Mind.

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

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.

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

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

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It Has Been Said That Beauty Is A Promise Of Happiness. Conversely, The Possibility Of Pleasure Can Be A Beginning Of Beauty.

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

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

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 Are Ordinarily So Indifferent To People That When We Have Invested One Of Them With The Possibility Of Giving Us Joy, Or Suffering, It Seems As If He Must Belong To Some Other Universe, He Is Imbued With Poetry.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

There Are Optical Illusions In Time As Well As Space.

Optical Illusions

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?

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

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.

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.

Lies Are Essential To Humanity.

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.

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.

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.

... 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.

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.

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.

...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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

The 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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!

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.

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

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

Normal And Abnormal

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.

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

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.

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

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.

One Becomes Moral As Soon As One Is Unhappy.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

The Heart Does Not Lie.

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.

The Only Paradise Is Paradise Lost.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Continuity Of Life

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

The 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

We Passionately Long That There May Be Another Life In Which We Shall Be Similar To What We Are Here Below. But We Do Not Pause To Reflect That, Even Without Waiting For That Other Life, In This Life, After A Few Years We Are Unfaithful To What We Have Been, To What We Wished To Remain Immortally.

The Most Powerful Soporific Is Sleep Itself.

I Should Have Been Happy: I Wasn’t.

Should Have Been

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

The Only Possible Paradises Are Those We Have Lost

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.

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.

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

Only Imagination And Belief Can Differentiate From The Rest Certain Objects, Certain People, And Can Create An Atmosphere.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Let Us Leave Pretty Women To Men Devoid Of Imagination.

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

Unhappy Childhood

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.)

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

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.

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

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

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

Memory Nourishes The Heart, And Grief Abates.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Love Is A Reciprocal Torture.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

In Love, Happiness Is An Abnormal State.

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.

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.

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

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

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Friedrich Durrenmatt

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