Marcel Proust

And suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which . . . my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea or tisane.

It is in sickness that we are compelled to recognize that we do not live alone but are chained to a being from a different realm, from whom we are worlds apart, who has no knowledge of us and by whom it is impossible to make ourselves understood: our body. . . . To ask pity of our body is like discoursing in front of an octopus, for which our words can have no more meaning than the sound of the tides, and with which we should be appalled to find ourselves condemned to live.

À la Recherche du Temps Perdu .

For a long time I used to go to bed early.

Les Demi-Vierges .

Our passions shape our books, repose writes them in the intervals.

[W]e must love men more than things, and I admire and weep more for the soldiers than for the churches which were only the recording of an heroic gesture which today is reenacted at every moment.

Time, which changes people, does not alter the image we have retained of them.

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.

All the mind’s activity is easy if it is not subjected to reality.

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.

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.

The loss of a sense adds as much beauty to the world as its acquisition.

Man is the creature that cannot emerge from himself, that knows his fellows only in himself; when he asserts the contrary, he is lying.

The 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.

The past not merely is not fugitive, it remains present.

It is the tragedy of other people that they are to us merely showcases for the very perishable collections of our own mind.

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.

The “sensibility” claimed by neurotics is matched by their egotism; they cannot abide the flaunting by others of the sufferings to which they pay an ever increasing attention in themselves.

When I am not too sad to listen, music is my consolation.

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.

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.

It is not because other people are dead that our affection for them grows faint, it is because we ourself are dying.

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.

Those whose suffering is due to love are, as we say of certain invalids, their own physicians.

There can be no peace of mind in love, since the advantage one has secured is never anything but a fresh starting-point for further desires.

Human altruism which is not egoism, is sterile.

Let a prize lower my position, if it causes me to be read; that I prefer immediately to all the honors.

The features of our face are hardly more than gestures which have become permanent.

The stellar universe is not so difficult of comprehension as the real actions of other people;

It is always thus, impelled by a state of mind which is destined not to last, that we make our irrevocable decisions.

At the heart of our friendly or purely social relations, there lurks a hostility momentarily cured but recurring by fits and starts.

They like my books better in England than in France; a translation would be very successful there.

It is desire that engenders belief and il we fjiil as a rule to take this into account, it is because most of the desires that create beliefs end ... only with our own life.

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.

Less disappointing than life is, great works of art do not begin by giving us all their best.