Marcel Proust
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.Collection: Interesting
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.Collection: Silence
People don't know when they are happy. They're never so unhappy as they think they are.Collection: Thinking
Every kiss provokes another. Oh, in those earliest days of love how naturally the kisses spring to life! So closely, in their profusion, do they crowd together that lovers would find it as hard to count the kisses exchanged in an hour as to count the flowers in a meadow in May.Collection: Spring
Beautiful books are always written in a sort of foreign language.Collection: Beautiful
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.Collection: Clouds
...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.Collection: Water
For, just as in the beginning it is formed by desire, so afterwards love is kept in existence only by painful anxiety.Collection: Love Is
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.Collection: Love
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.Collection: People
She was "a woman of uncertain age.Collection: Age
Existence is of little interest save on days when the dust of realities is mingled with magic sand.Collection: Reality
Many years have passed since that night. The wall of the staircase up which I had watched the light of his candle gradually climb was long ago demolished. And in myself, too, many things have perished which I imagined would last for ever, and new ones have arisen, giving birth to new sorrows and new joys which in those days I could not have foreseen, just as now the old are hard to understand.Collection: Wall
The only possible paradises are those we have lostCollection: Paradise
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.Collection: Grief
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.Collection: Real
A man of letters, merely by reading a phrase, can estimate exactly the literary merit of its author.Collection: Reading
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.Collection: Reality
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.Collection: Years
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'.Collection: Doubt
Masterpieces are no more than the shipwrecked flotsam of great minds.Collection: Mind
Our passions shape our books, repose writes them in the intervals.Collection: Book
Now are the woods all black, But still the sky is blue.Collection: Blue
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.Collection: Confused
At the heart of our friendly or purely social relations, there lurks a hostility momentarily cured but recurring by fits and starts.Collection: Heart
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.Collection: Beautiful
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.Collection: Eye
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.Collection: New Life
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 rainCollection: Rain
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.Collection: Order
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.Collection: Love
When I am not too sad to listen, music is my consolation.Collection: Music
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.Collection: Depression
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.Collection: Photography
If there is one thing more difficult than submitting oneself to a regime it is refraining from imposing it on other people.Collection: People
The courage of one's opinions is always a form of calculating cowardice in the eyes of the "other side.Collection: Eye
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.Collection: Reading
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.Collection: Views
The most familiar precepts are not always the truest.Collection: Truth
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.Collection: Spiritual
The loss of a sense adds as much beauty to the world as its acquisition.Collection: Beauty
Love...., ever unsatisfied, lives always in the moment that is about to come.Collection: Moments
Dear Friend: I have nearly died three times since morning.Collection: Morning
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.Collection: Giving Up
A little insomnia is not without its value in making us appreciate sleep, in throwing a ray of light upon that darkness.Collection: Sleep
No man is a complete mystery except to himself.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Life
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.Collection: Book