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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.

-Marcel Proust

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We Pack The Physical

Marcel Proust

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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.

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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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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 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 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.

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.

People Who Laugh So Heartily At What They Themselves Have Said, When It Is Not Funny, Dispense Us Accordingly, By Taking Upon Themselves The Responsibility For The Mirth, From Joining In It.

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

Medicine Being A Compendium Of The Successive And Contradictory Mistakes Of Medical Practitioners, When We Summon The Wisest Of Them To Our Aid, The Chances Are That We May Be Relying On A Scientific Truth The Error Of Which Will Be Recognized In A Few Years Time.

We Become Moral When We Are Unhappy.

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.

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.

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

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.

The Most Familiar Precepts Are Not Always The Truest.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

Under Each Station Of The Real, Another Glimmers.

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

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.

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.

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?

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

...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.

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

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

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

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

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?

For Each Illness That Doctors Cure With Medicine, They Provoke Ten In Healthy People By Inoculating Them With The Virus That Is A Thousand Times More Powerful Than Any Microbe: The Idea That One Is Ill.

We 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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

The Soldier Is Convinced That A Certain Indefinitely Extendable Time Period Is Accorded Him Before He Is Killed, The Burglar Before He Is Caught, Men In General, Before They Must Die. That Is The Amulet Which Preserves Individuals — And Sometimes Populations — Not From Danger, But From The Fear Of Danger, In Reality From The Belief In Danger, Which In Some Cases Allows Them To Brave It Without Being Brave. Such A Confidence, Just As Unfounded, Supports The Lover Who Counts On A Reconciliation, A Letter.

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

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

If A Little Dreaming Is Dangerous, The Cure For It Is Not To Dream Less But To Dream More, To Dream All The Time.

Everything That Seems Imperishable Tends To Extinguishment.

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

Let But A Single Flash Of Reality -- The Glimpse Of A Woman From Afar Or From Behind -- Enable Us To Project The Image Of Beauty Before Our Eyes, And We Imagine That We Have Recognised It, Our Hearts Beat, And We Will Always Remain Half-persuaded That It Was She, Provided That The Woman Has Vanished: It Is Only If We Manage To Overtake Her That We Realise Our Mistake.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

She Was "a Woman Of Uncertain Age.

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 Most Powerful Soporific Is Sleep Itself.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

The Great Quality Of True Art Is That It Rediscovers, Grasps And Reveals To Us That Reality Far From Where We Live, From Which We Get Farther And Farther Away As The Conventional Knowledge We Substitute For It Becomes Thicker And More Impermeable.

The 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.

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.

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

Our Intonations Contain Our Philosophy Of Life, What Each Of Us Is Constantly Telling Himself About Things.

Life Philosophy

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

I Should Have Been Happy: I Wasn’t.

Should Have Been

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.

Similarly The Men Who Produce Works Of Genius Are Not Those Who Live In The Most Delicate Atmosphere, Whose Conversation Is Most Brilliant, Or Their Culture Broadest, But Those Who Have Had The Power, Ceasing In A Moment To Live Only For Themselves, To Make Use Of Their Personality As Of A Mirror.

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

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.

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

Unhappy Childhood

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.

Death Is In Truth An Illness From Which We Recover

A Photograph Acquires Something Of The Dignity Which It Ordinarily Lacks When It Ceases To Be A Reproduction Of Reality And Shows Us Things That No Longer Exist.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Normal And Abnormal

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

True Variety Is In That Plenitude Of Real And Unexpected Elements, In The Branch Charged With Blue Flowers Thrusting Itself, Against All Expectations, From The Springtime Hedge Which Seems Already Too Full, While The Purely Formal Imitation Of Varietyis But Void And Uniformity, That Is, That Which Is Most Opposed To Variety.

... 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.

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

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

There Is No More Ridiculous Custom Than The One That Makes You Express Sympathy Once And For All On A Given Day To A Person Whose Sorrow Will Endure As Long As His Life. Such Grief, Felt In Such A Way Is Always Present, It Is Never Too Late To Talk About It, Never Repetitious To Mention It Again.

We 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

That Abominable And Sensual Act Called Reading The Newspaper, Thanks To Which All The Misfortunes And Cataclysms In The Universe Over The Last Twenty-four Hours, The Battles Which Cost The Lives Of Fifty-thousand Men, The Murders, The Strikes, The Bankruptcies, The Fires, The Poisonings, The Suicides, The Divorces, The Cruel Emotions Of Statesmen And Actors, Are Transformed For Us, Who Don't Even Care, Into A Morning Treat, Blending In Wonderfully, In A Particularly Exciting And Tonic Way, With The Recommended Ingestion Of A Few Sips Of Cafe Au Lait.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

Do Not Wait For Life. Do Not Long For It. Be Aware, Always And At Every Moment, That The Miracle Is In The Here And Now.

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.

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.

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.)

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

The Reason Why Life May Be Judged To Be Trivial Although At Certain Moments It Seems To Us So Beautiful Is That We Form Our Judgment, Ordinarily, Not On The Evidence Of Life Itself But Of Those Quite Different Images Which Preserve Nothing Of Life-and Therefore We Judge It Disparagingly.

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.

If, I Can Someday See M. Claude Monet's Garden, I Feel Sure That I Shall See Something That Is Not So Much A Garden Of Flowers As Of Colours And Tones, Less An Old-fashioned Flower Garden Than A Colour Garden, So To Speak, One That Achieves An Effect Not Entirely Nature's, Because It Was Planted So That Only The Flowers With Matching Colours Will Bloom At The Same Time, Harmonized In An Infinite Stretch Of Blue Or Pink.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Pour E Crire Ce Livre Essentiel, Le Seul Livre Vrai, Un Grand E Crivain N'a Pas, Dans Le Sens Courant, A' L'inventer Puisqu'il Existe De J A' En Chacun De Nous, Mais A' Le Traduire. To Write The Essential Book, The Only True Book, A Great Writerdoesnot Needto Invent Becausethebook Already Exists Inside Each One Of Us And Merely Needs Translation.

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.

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

That Translucent Alabaster Of Our Memories.

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.

Desire Makes Everything Blossom

There Is No Doubt That A Person's Charms Are Less Frequently A Cause Of Love Than A Remark Such As: 'no, This Evening I Shan't Be Free'.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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