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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.

-Marcel Proust

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We Scornfully Decline, Because

Marcel Proust

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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.

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

To Understand A Profound Thought Is To Have, At The Moment One Understands It, A Profound Thought Oneself; And This Demands Some Effort, A Genuine Descent To The Heart Of Oneself . . . Only Desire And Love Give Us The Strength To Make This Effort. The Only Books That We Truly Absorb Are Those We Read With Real Appetite, After Having Worked Hard To Get Them, So Great Had Been Our Need Of Them.

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

We Say That The Hour Of Death Cannot Be Forecast, But When We Say This We Imagine That Hour As Placed In An Obscure And Distant Future. It Never Occurs To Us That It Has Any Connection With The Day Already Begun Or That Death Could Arrive This Same Afternoon, This Afternoon Which Is So Certain And Which Has Every Hour Filled In Advance.

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.

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.

Certainly, It Is More Reasonable To Devote One's Life To Women Than To Postage Stamps Or Old Snuff-boxes, Even To Pictures Or Statues. But The Example Of Other Collections Should Be A Warning To Us To Diversify, To Have Not One Woman Only But Several.

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.

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.

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

And So It Is With Our Own Past. It Is A Labour In Vain To Attempt To Recapture It: All The Efforts Of Our Intellect Must Prove Futile. The Past Is Hidden Somewhere Outside The Realm, Beyond The Reach Of Intellect, In Some Material Object (in The Sensation Which That Material Object Will Give Us) Of Which We Have No Inkling. And It Depends On Chance Whether Or Not We Come Upon This Object Before We Ourselves Must Die.

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.

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

Photography Is The Product Of Complete Alienation.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Memory Nourishes The Heart, And Grief Abates.

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.

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

What Barrier Is So Insurmountable As Silence?

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.

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

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.

Reading Is At The Threshold Of Spiritual Life; It Can Introduce Us To It; It Does Not Constitute It. There Are, However, Certain Cases, Certain Pathological Cases, So To Speak, Of Spiritual Depression In Which Reading Can Become A Sort Of Curative Discipline And Assume The Task, Through Repeated Stimulation, Of Continuously Reintroducing A Lazy Mind Into The Life Of The Spirit.

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.

Daughters Of The Attitude That Produced Them, Certain Women Will Not Appeal To Us Without The Double Bed In Which We Find Peace By Their Side, While Others, To Be Caressed With A More Secret Intention, Require Leaves Blown By The Wind, Water Rippling In The Dark, Things As Light And Fleeting As They Are.

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.

... 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.

No Man Is A Complete Mystery Except To Himself.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Poets Claim That We Recapture For A Moment The Self That We Were Long Ago When We Enter Some House Or Garden In Which We Used To Live In Our Youth. But These Are Most Hazardous Pilgrimages, Which End As Often In Disappointment As In Success. It Is In Ourselves That We Should Rather Seek To Find Those Fixed Places, Contemporaneous With Different Years.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

As Soon As He Ceased To Be Mad He Became Merely Stupid. There Are Maladies We Must Not Seek To Cure Because They Alone Protect Us From Others That Are More Serious.

The One Thing More Difficult Than Following A Regime Is Keeping From Imposing It On Others.

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.

It Is In Moments Of Illness That We Are Compelled To Recognize That We Live Not Alone But Chained To A Creature Of A Different Kingdom, Whole Worlds Apart, Who Has No Knowledge Of Us And By Whom It Is Impossible To Make Ourselves Understood: Our Body.

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.

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

Unhappy Childhood

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

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

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.

Human Altruism Which Is Not Egoism, Is Sterile.

Humanitarianism

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

She Was "a Woman Of Uncertain Age.

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

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.

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.

Death Is In Truth An Illness From Which We Recover

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

Lies Are Essential To Humanity.

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

Desire Makes Everything Blossom

We May Have Revolved Every Possible Idea In Our Minds, And Yet The Truth Has Never Occurred To Us, And It Is From Without, When We Are Least Expecting It, That It Gives Us Its Cruel Stab And Wounds Us Forever.

What Artists Call Posterity Is The Posterity Of The Work Of Art.

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

The Most Powerful Soporific Is Sleep Itself.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

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 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.

It's Odd How A Person Always Arouses Admiration For His Moral Qualities Among The Relatives Of Another With Whom He Has Sexual Relations. Physical Love, So Unjustifiably Decried, Makes Everyone Show, Down To The Least Detail, All He Has Of Goodness And Self-sacrifice, So That He Shines Even In The Eyes Of Those Nearest To Him.

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

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

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

This Dim Coolness Of My Room Was To The Broad Daylight Of The Street What The Shadow Is To The Sunbeam, That Is To Say Equally Luminous, And Presented To My Imagination The Entire Panorama Of Summer, Which My Senses, If I Had Been Out Walking, Could Have Tasted And Enjoyed Only Piecemeal; And So It Was Quite In Harmony With My State Of Repose Which (thanks To The Enlivening Adventures Related In My Books) Sustained, Like A Hand Reposing Motionless In A Stream Of Running Water, The Shock And Animation Of A Torrent Of Activity.

A 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.

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

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 Love Only What We Do Not Wholly Possess.

We Do Not Receive Wisdom, We Must Discover It For Ourselves, After A Journey Through The Wilderness Which No One Else Can Make For Us, Which No One Can Spare Us, For Our Wisdom Is The Point Of View From Which We Come At Last To Regard The World.

A 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.

Under Each Station Of The Real, Another Glimmers.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

We Become Moral When We Are Unhappy.

One Becomes Moral As Soon As One Is Unhappy.

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.

... 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.

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.

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.

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

Life Philosophy

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Continuity Of Life

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

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.

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

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

The Most Familiar Precepts Are Not Always The Truest.

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.

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

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

The Bonds Between Ourselves And Another Person Exists Only In Our Minds. Memory As It Grows Fainter Loosens Them, And Notwithstanding The Illusion By Which We Want To Be Duped And Which, Out Of Love, Friendship, Politeness, Deference, Duty, We Dupe Other People, We Exist Alone. Man Is The Creature Who Cannot Escape From Himself, Who Knows Other People Only In Himself, And When He Asserts The Contrary, He Is Lying.

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

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

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

Love Is A Reciprocal Torture.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

It Is Comforting When One Has A Sorrow To Lie In The Warmth Of One's Bed And There, Abandoning All Effort And All Resistance, To Bury Even One's Head Under The Cover, Giving One's Self Up To It Completely, Moaning Like Branches In The Autumn Wind. But There Is Still A Better Bed, Full Of Divine Odors. It Is Our Sweet, Our Profound, Our Impenetrable Friendship.

A Man Who Falls Straight Into Bed Night After Night, And Ceases To Live Until The Moment When He Wakes And Rises, Will Surely Never Dream Of Making, I Don't Say Great Discoveries, But Even Minor Observations About Sleep. He Scarcely Knows That He Is Asleep. A Little Insomnia Is Not Without Its Value In Making Us Appreciate Sleep, In Throwing A Ray Of Light Upon That Darkness.

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

A Certain Similarity Exists, Although The Type Evolves, Between All The Women We Love, A Similarity That Is Due To The Fixity Of Our Own Temperament, Which It Is That Chooses Them, Eliminating All Those Who Would Not Be At Once Our Opposite And Our Complement, Fitted That Is To Say To Gratify Our Senses And To Wring Our Heart.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

L'adulte' Re Introduit L'esprit Dans La Lettre Quebien Souvent Le Mariage E U" T Laisse E Morte. Adultery Breathes New Life Into Marriages Which Have Been Left For Dead.

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

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

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 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.

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

Creation Of The World

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.

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

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

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

Everything That Seems Imperishable Tends To Extinguishment.

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

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

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

... 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.

When We Are In Love, Our Love Is Too Big A Thing For Us To Be Able Altogether To Contain It Within Ourselves. It Radiates Towards The Loved One, Finds There A Surface Which Arrests It, Forcing It To Return To Its Starting-point, And It Is This Repercussion Of Our Own Feeling Which We Call The Other's Feelings And Which Charms Us More Then Than On Its Outward Journey Because We Do Not Recognise It As Having Originated In Ourselves.

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

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.

All The Mind's Activity Is Easy If It Is Not Subjected To Reality.

Instead Of Seeking New Landscapes, Develop New Eyes.

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

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

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.

It Is Up To My Spirit To Find The Truth. But How? Grave Uncertainty, Each Time The Spirit Feels Beyond Its Own Comprehension; Whenit, The Explorer, Is Altogether To Obscure Land That It Must Search And Where All Its Baggage Is Of No Use. To Search? That Is Not All: To Create.

We 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.

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.

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.

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

Normal And Abnormal

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