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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.

-Marcel Proust

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We Passionately Long That

Marcel Proust

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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.

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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.

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

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.

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.

What Barrier Is So Insurmountable As Silence?

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.

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

Human Altruism Which Is Not Egoism, Is Sterile.

Humanitarianism

My Destination Is No Longer A Place, Rather A New Way Of Seeing.

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.

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.)

Love Is Space And Time Measured By The Heart.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Sometimes In The Afternoon Sky The Moon Would Pass White As A Cloud, Furtive, Lusterless, Like An Actress Who Does Not Have To Perform Yet And Who, From The Audience, In Street Clothes, Watches The Other Actors For A Moment, Making Herself Inconspicuous, Not Wanting Anyone To Pay Attention To Her.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

Let Us Be Grateful To People Who Make Us Happy.

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

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.

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

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

Creation Of The World

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

Everything We Think Of As Great Has Come To Us From Neurotics. It Is They And They Alone Who Found Religions And Create Great Works Of Art. The World Will Never Realize How Much It Owes To Them And What They Have Suffered In Order To Bestow Their Gifts On It.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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

We Must Never Be Afraid To Go Too Far, For Truth Lies Beyond.

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.

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

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

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

...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.

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

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

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

No Days, Perhaps, Of All Our Childhood Are Ever So Fully Lived As Those That We Had Regarded As Not Being Lived At All: Days Spent Wholly With A Favourite Book. Everything That Seemed To Fill Them Full For Others We Pushed Aside, Because It Stood Between Us And The Pleasures Of The Gods.

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 True Paradises Are The Paradises That We Have Lost.

A Little Tap At The Window, As Though Some Missile Had Struck It, Followed By A Plentiful, Falling Sound, As Light, Though, As If A Shower Of Sand Were Being Sprinkled From A Window Overhead; Then The Fall Spread, Took On An Order, A Rhythm, Became Liquid, Loud, Drumming, Musical, Innumerable, Universal. It Was The Rain

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.

Instead Of Seeking New Landscapes, Develop New Eyes.

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

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.

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

Physical Love, So Unjustly Decried, Forces Everyone To Manifest Even The Smallest Bits Of Kindness He Possesses, Of Selflessness,that They Shine In The Eyes Of All Who Surround Him.

The Only Paradise Is Paradise 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.

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

However, The Danger In [socially Unbalanced Relationships] Is That The Subjection Of The Woman Temporarily Calms The Man's Jealousy But Also Renders It More Demanding. He Ends Up Making His Mistress Live Like Those Prisoners On Whom Light Is Shone Day And Night In Order For Them To Be Better Watched. And Things Always End In Tragedy.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

Through Art Alone Are We Able To Emerge From Ourselves, To Know What Another Person Sees Of A Universe Which Is Not The Same As Our Own And Of Which, Without Art, The Landscapes Would Remain As Unknown To Us As Those That May Exist On The Moon.

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

When The Mind Has A Tendency To Dream, It Is A Mistake To Keep Dreams Away From It, To Ration Its Dreams. So Long As You Distract Your Mind From Its Dreams, It Will Not Know Them For What They Are; You Will Always Be Being Taken In By The Appearance Of Things, Because You Will Not Have Grasped Their True Nature. If A Little Dreaming Is Dangerous, The Cure For It Is Not To Dream Less But To Dream More, To Dream All The Time. One Must Have A Thorough Understanding Of One

The Truth Has No Need To Be Uttered To Be Made Apparent, And ... One May Perhaps Gather It With More Certainty, Without Waiting For Words And Without Even Taking Any Account Of Them, From Countless Outward Signs, Even From Certain Invisible Phenomena, Analogous In The Sphere Of Human Character To What Atmospheric Changes Are In The Physical World.

I Should Have Been Happy: I Wasn’t.

Should Have Been

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

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.

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.

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

We Love Only What We Do Not Wholly Possess.

The Time At Our Disposal Each Day Is Elastic; The Passions We Feel Dilate It, Those That Inspire Us Shrink It, And Habit Fills It.

The Most Familiar Precepts Are Not Always The Truest.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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?

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.

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

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

After A Certain Age, The More One Becomes Oneself, The More Obvious One's Family Traits Become.

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.

... 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.

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.

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.

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.

No Man Is A Complete Mystery Except To Himself.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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

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

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.

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

That Translucent Alabaster Of Our Memories.

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 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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

A Person Does Not...stand Motionless And Clear Before Our Eyes With His Merits, His Defects, His Plans, His Intentions With Regard To Ourself Exposed On His Surface...but Is A Shadow Which We Can Never Succeed In Penetrating...a Shadow Behind Which We Can Alternately Imagine, With Equal Justification, That There Burns The Flame Of Hatred And Of Love.

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

The Character We Exhibit In The Latter Half Of Our Life Need Not Necessarily Be, Though It Often Is, Our Original Character, Developed Further, Dried Up, Exaggerated, Or Diminished. It Can Be Its Exact Opposite, Like A Suit Worn Inside Out.

Love Is A Reciprocal Torture.

Death Is In Truth An Illness From Which We Recover

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

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

Certain Favourite Roles Are Played By Us So Often Before The Public And Rehearsed So Carefully When We Are Alone That We Find It Easier To Refer To Their Fictitious Testimony Than To That Of A Reality Which We Have Almost Entirely Forgotten.

The Most Powerful Soporific Is Sleep Itself.

The Disinterest [of My Two Great-aunts] In Anything That Had To Do With High Society Was Such That Their Sense Of Hearing ... Put To Rest Its Receptor Organs And Allowed Them To Suffer The True Beginnings Of Atrophy.

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

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.

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

The 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Memory Nourishes The Heart, And Grief Abates.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

For Often I Have Wished To See A Person Again Without Realising That It Was Simply Because That Personal Recalled To Me A Hedge Of Hawthorns In Blossom, And I Have Been Led To Believe, And To Make Someone Else Believe, In A Renewal Of Affection, By What Was No More Than An Inclination To Travel.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

She Was "a Woman Of Uncertain Age.

In The Sort Of Screen Dappled With Different States Of Mind Which My Consciousness Would Simultaneously Unfold While I Read, And Which Ranged From The Aspirations Hidden Deepest Within Me To The Completely Exterior Vision Of The Horizon Which I Had, At The Bottom Of The Garden, Before My Eyes, What Was First In Me, Innermost, The Constantly Moving Handle That Controlled The Rest, Was My Belief In The Philosophical Richness And Beauty Of The Book I Was Reading, And My Desire To Appropriate Them For Myself, Whatever That Book Might Be.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

...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.

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.

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

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

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.

To The Pure All Things Are Pure!

Confidence In Others

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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