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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.

-Marcel Proust

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It Is The Wicked

Marcel Proust

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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.

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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

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

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

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 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.

Indeed, Among The Lesser Auxiliaries To Success In Love, An Absence, The Declining Of An Invitation To Dinner, An Unintentional, Unconscious Harshness Are Of More Service Than All The Cosmetics And Fine Clothes In The World.

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

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.

The True Paradises Are The Paradises That We Have Lost.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Most Powerful Soporific Is Sleep Itself.

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.

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

Illness Is The Doctor To Whom We Pay Most Heed; To Kindness, To Knowledge, We Make Promise Only; Pain We Obey.

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

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

Creation Of The World

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

Continuity Of Life

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

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

We 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.

Love...., Ever Unsatisfied, Lives Always In The Moment That Is About To Come.

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

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

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

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.

There Comes In All Our Lives A Time ... When The Ears Can Listen To No Music Save What The Moonlight Breathes Through The Flute Of Silence.

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

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.

There Are Optical Illusions In Time As Well As Space.

Optical Illusions

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

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

...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.

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!

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.

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

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

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

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

Let Us Be Grateful To People Who Make Us Happy.

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.

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

... 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.

No Man Is A Complete Mystery Except To Himself.

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

Unhappy Childhood

Do You Suppose That It Is Within Your Power To Insult Me? You Evidently Are Not Aware To Whom You Are Speaking? Do You Imagine That The Envenomed Spittle Of Five Hundred Little Gentlemen Of Your Type, Heaped One Upon Another, Would Succeed In Slobbering So Much As The Tips Of My August Toes?

Instead Of Seeking New Landscapes, Develop New Eyes.

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

We Ought At Least, From Prudence, Never To Speak Of Ourselves, Because That Is A Subject On Which We May Be Sure That Other People's Views Are Never In Accordance With Our Own.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

We Are Healed Of A Suffering Only By Experiencing It To The Full.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

Pleasures Are Like Photographs: In The Presence Of The Person We Love, We Take Only Negatives, Which We Develop Later, At Home, When We Have At Our Disposal Once More Our Inner Dark Room, The Door Of Which It Is Strictly Forbidden To Open While Others Are Present.

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

To Achieve Accurate Knowledge Of Others, If Such A Thing Were Possible, We Could Only Ever Arrive At It Through The Slow And Unsure Recognition Of Our Own Initial Optical Inaccuracies. However, Such Knowledge Is Not Possible: For, While Our Vision Of Others Is Being Adjusted, They, Who Are Not Made Of Mere Brute Matter, Are Also Changing; We Think We Have Managed To See Them More Clearly, But They Shift; And When We Believe We Have Them Fully In Focus, It Is Merely Our Older Images Of Them That We Have Clarified, But Which Are Themselves Already Out Of Date.

There Is 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.

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

After A Certain Age Our Memories Are So Intertwined With One Another That What We Are Thinking Of, The Book We Are Reading, Scarcely Matters Any More. We Have Put Something Of Ourselves Everywhere, Everything Is Fertile, Everything Is Dangerous, And We Can Make Discoveries No Less Precious Than In Pascal's Pensées In An Advertisement For Soap.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

Human Altruism Which Is Not Egoism, Is Sterile.

Humanitarianism

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Even Though Our Lives Wander, Our Memories Remain In One Place.

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.

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

What We Have Not Had To Decipher, To Elucidate By Our Own Efforts, What Was Clear Before We Looked At It, Is Not Ours. From Ourselves Comes Only That Which We Drag Forth From The Obscurity Which Lies Within Us, That Which To Others Is Unknown.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

A Little Insomnia Is Not Without Its Value In Making Us Appreciate Sleep, In Throwing A Ray Of Light Upon That Darkness.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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?

Sometimes In This Life, Under The Stress Of An Exceptional Emotion, People Do Say What They Think.

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

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.

The Thirst For Something Other Than What We Have…to Bring Something New, Even If It Is Worse, Some Emotion, Some Sorrow; When Our Sensibility, Which Happiness Has Silenced Like An Idle Harp, Wants To Resonate Under Some Hand, Even A Rough One, And Even If It Might Be Broken By It.

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

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.

We Don't Receive Wisdom; We Must Discover It For Ourselves After A Journey That No One Can Take For Us Or Spare Us.

The 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.

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.

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

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

Normal And Abnormal

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

... 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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

She Poured Out Swann's Tea, Inquired "lemon Or Cream?" And, On His Answering "cream, Please," Said To Him With A Laugh: "a Cloud!" And As He Pronounced It Excellent, "you See, I Know Just How You Like It." This Tea Had Indeed Seemed To Swann, Just As It Seemed To Her; Something Precious, And Love Has Such A Need To Find Some Justification For Itself, Some Guarantee Of Duration, In Pleasures Which Without It Would Have No Existence And Must Cease With Its Passing.

The Fact Of The Matter Is That, Since We Are Determined Always To Keep Our Feelings To Ourselves, We Have Never Given Any Thought To The Manner In Which We Should Express Them. And Suddenly There Is Within Us A Strange And Obscene Animal Making Itself Heard, Whose Tones May Inspire As Much Alarm In The Person Who Receives The Involuntary, Elliptical And Almost Irresistible Communication Of One's Defect Or Vice As Would The Sudden Avowal Indirectly And Outlandishly Proffered By A Criminal Who Can No Longer Refrain From Confessing To A Murder Of Which One Had Never Imagined Him To Be Guilty.

At A Certain Age, We Have Already Been Struck By Love; It No Longer Develops Alone, According To Its Own Mysteries And Fateful Laws While Our Hearts Stand By Startled And Passive. We Come To Its Assistancerecognizing One Of Its Symptoms, We Recall, We Bring Back To Life The Others. Since We Possess Its Song Engraved In Its Totality Within Us, We Do Not Need For A Woman To Tell Us The Beginning--filled With Admiration Inspired By Beauty--to Find The Continuation.

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.

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

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.

As Long As Men Are Free To Ask What They Must, Free To Say What They Think, Free To Think What They Will, Freedom Can Never Be Lost And Science Can Never Regress.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Under Each Station Of The Real, Another Glimmers.

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.

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

Like Everybody Who Is Not In Love, He Thought One Chose The Person To Be Loved After Endless Deliberations And On The Basis Of Particular Qualities Or Advantages.

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

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.

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

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

But Sometimes The Future Is Latent In Us Without Our Knowing It, And Our Supposedly Lying Words Foreshadow An Imminent Reality.

Thanks To Art, Instead Of Seeing One World Only, Our Own, We See That World Multiply Itself And We Have At Our Disposal As Many Worlds As There Are Original Artists, Worlds More Different One From The Other Than Those Which Revolve In Infinite Space, Worlds Which, Centuries After The Extinction Of The Fire From Which Their Light First Emanated, Whether It Is Called Rembrandt Or Vermeer, Send Us Still Each One Its Special Radiance.

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

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

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

Less Disappointing Than Life, Great Works Of Art Do Not Begin By Giving Us All Their Best.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

An Hour Is Not Merely An Hour, It Is A Vase Full Of Scents And Sounds And Projects And Climates.

Desire Makes Everything Blossom

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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