She's on the stairs, ma'am, getting her breath,' said the young servant, who had not been long up from the country, where my mother had the excellent habit of getting all her servants. Often she had s...
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. An exquisite pleasure h...
The inertia of the mind urges it to slide down the easy slope of imagination, rather than to climb the steep slope of introspection.
But genius, and even great talent, springs less from seeds of intellect and social refinement superior to those of other people than from the faculty of transforming and transposing them. To heat a li...
Carried away in a sort of dream, he smiled, then he began to hurry back towards the lady; he was walking faster than usual, and his shoulders swayed backwards and forwards, right and left, in the most...
Now I could appreciate the merits of a broad, poetical, powerful interpretation, or rather it was to this that those epithets were conventionally applied, but only as we give the names of Mars, Venus,...
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...
We enjoy lovely music, beautiful paintings, a thousand intellectual delicacies, but we have no idea of their cost, to those who invented them, in sleepless nights, tears, spasmodic laughter, rashes, a...
The nose is generally the organ in which stupidity is most readily displayed.
Time passes, and little by little everything that we have spoken in falsehood becomes true.
One says the things which one feels the need to say, and which the other will not understand: one speaks for oneself alone.
Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.
Just is not by other men of intelligence that an intelligent an is afraid of being thought a fool, so it is not by the great gentleman but by boors and 'bounders' that a man of fashion is afraid of fi...
From the sound of pattering raindrops I recaptured the scent of the lilacs at Combray; from the shifting of the sun's rays on the balcony the pigeons in the Champs-Elysées; from the muffling of sounds...
We are healed from suffering only by experiencing it to the full.
People are not always very tolerant of the tears which they themselves have provoked.
Illness is the doctor to whom we pay most heed to kindness, to knowledge, we make promise only pain we obey.
But, when nothing subsists of an old past, after the death of people, after the destruction of things, alone, frailer but more enduring, more immaterial, more persistent, more faithful, smell and tast...
My destination is no longer a place, rather a new way of seeing.
So few are the easy victories as the ultimate failures.