Background Image

...

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.

-Marcel Proust

...

Please Wait....
Translating....

The Great Quality Of

Marcel Proust

...

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.

Views: 6

Topic

More From Marcel Proust

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

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 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.

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.

No Sooner Had The Warm Liquid Mixed With The Crumbs Touched My Palate Than A Shudder Ran Through Me And I Stopped, Intent Upon The Extraordinary Thing That Was Happening To Me.

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

Memory Nourishes The Heart, And Grief Abates.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

When We Have Passed A Certain Age, The Soul Of The Child We Were And The Souls Of The Dead From Whom We Have Sprung Come To Lavish On Us Their Riches And Their Spells.

The 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.

... 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Under Each Station Of The Real, Another Glimmers.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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?

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

Habit! That Skillful But Slow Arranger, Which Starts Out By Letting Our Spirit Suffer For Weeks In A Temporary State, But That Thespirit Is After All Happy To Discover, For Without Habit And Reduced To Its Own Resources, The Spirit Would Be Unable To Make Any Lodgings Seem Habitable.

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

Are Not The Thoughts Of The Dying Often Turned Towards The Practical, Painful, Obscure, Visceral Aspect, Towards The "seamy Side" Of Death Which Is, As It Happens, The Side That Death Actually Presents To Them And Forces Them To Feel, And Which Far More Closely Resembles A Crushing Burden, A Difficulty In Breathing, A Destroying Thirst, Than The Abstract Idea To Which We Are Accustomed To Give The Name Of Death?

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

Creation Of The World

Perhaps The Pleasure One Feels In Writing Is Not The Infallible Test Of The Literary Value Of A Page; Perhaps It Is Only A Secondary State Which Is Often Superadded, But The Want Of Which Can Have No Prejudicial Effect On It. Perhaps Some Of The Greatest Masterpieces Were Written While Yawning.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Remembrance Of Things Past Is Not Necessarily The Remembrance Of Things As They Were.

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

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

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

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

Normal And Abnormal

We Love Only What We Do Not Wholly Possess.

The Heart Does Not Lie.

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

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

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!

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

The Only Paradise Is Paradise Lost.

Love Is A Reciprocal Torture.

We Have Such Numerous Interests In Our Lives That It Is Not Uncommon, On A Single Occasion, For The Foundations Of A Happiness That Does Not Yet Exist To Be Laid Down Alongside The Intensification Of A Grief From Which We Are Still Suffering.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

...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.

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.

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.

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.

To The Pure All Things Are Pure!

Confidence In Others

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

What An Abyss Of Uncertainty, Whenever The Mind Feels Overtaken By Itself; When It, The Seeker, Is At The Same Time The Dark Region Through Which It Must Go Seeking And Where All Its Equipment Will Avail It Nothing. Seek? More Than That: Create. It Is Face To Face With Something Which Does Not Yet Exist, Which It Alone Can Make Actual, Which It Alone Can Bring Into The Light Of Day.

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

In A Language Known To Us, We Have Substituted The Opacity Of The Sounds With The Transparence Of The Ideas. But A Language We Donot Know Is A Closed Place In Which The One We Love Can Deceive Us, Making Us, Locked Outside And Convulsed In Our Impotence, Incapable Of Seeing Or Preventing Anything.

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

Truth Is A Point Of View About Things.

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.

Our Words Are, As A General Rule, Filled By The People To Whom We Address Them With A Meaning Which Those People Derive From Their Own Substance, A Meaning Widely Different From That Which We Had Put Into The Same Words When We Uttered Them.

We 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.

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.

No Man Is A Complete Mystery Except To Himself.

Everything That Seems Imperishable Tends To Extinguishment.

The True Paradises Are The Paradises That We Have Lost.

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.

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

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.

Reality Is Never More Than A First Step Towards An Unknown On The Road To Which One Can Never Progress Very Far.

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.

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.

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.

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

... 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.

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

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

Death Is In Truth An Illness From Which We Recover

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Instead Of Seeking New Landscapes, Develop New Eyes.

I Should Have Been Happy: I Wasn’t.

Should Have Been

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

According To A Charming Law Of Nature Which Is Evident Even In The Most Sophisticated Societies, We Live In Complete Ignorance Of Whatever We Love.

Even The Simple Act That We Call "going To Visit A Person Of Our Acquaintance" Is In Part An Intellectual Act. We Fill The Physical Appearance Of The Person We See With All The Notions We Have About Him, And In The Totality Of Our Impressions About Him, These Notions Play The Most Important Role.

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.

Human Altruism Which Is Not Egoism, Is Sterile.

Humanitarianism

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

Unhappy Childhood

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

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

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.

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

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

Continuity Of Life

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.

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.

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.

Our Intellect Is Not The Most Subtle, The Most Powerful, The Most Appropriate, Instrument For Revealing The Truth. It Is Life That, Little By Little, Example By Example, Permits Us To See That What Is Most Important To Our Heart, Or To Our Mind, Is Learned Not By Reasoning But Through Other Agencies. Then It Is That The Intellect, Observing Their Superiority, Abdicates Its Control To Them Upon Reasoned Grounds And Agrees To Become Their Collaborator And Lackey.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Love Is Space And Time Measured By The Heart.

... 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.

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

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.

The Bonds That Unite Us To Another Human Being Are Sanctified When He Or She Adopts The Same Point Of View As Ourselves In Judging One Of Our Imperfections.

Like A Kaleidoscope Which Is Every Now And Then Given A Turn, Society Arranges Successively In Different Orders Elements Which One Would Have Supposed Immutable, And Composes A New Pattern.

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.

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

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

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

This Labour Of The Artist To Discover A Means Of Apprehending Beneath Matter And Experience, Beneath Words, Something Different From Their Appearance, Is Of An Exactly Contrary Nature To The Operation In Which Pride, Passion, Intelligence And Habit Are Constantly Engaged Within Us When We Spend Our Lives Without Self-communion, Accumulating As Though To Hide Our True Impressions, The Terminology For Practical Ends Which We Falsely Call Life.

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.

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

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

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.

...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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

What Barrier Is So Insurmountable As Silence?

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.

Trending Author

Maximilian Schell

Kathleen Battle

Category