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. Th...
On no days of our childhood did we live so fully perhaps as those we thought we had left behind without living them, those that we spent with a favourite book.
Nine tenths of the ills from which intelligent people suffer spring from their intellect.
I think that life would suddenly seem wonderful to us if we were threatened to die as you say. Just think of how many projects, travels, love affairs, studies, it–our life–hides from us, made invisibl...
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.
People wish to learn to swim and at the same time to keep one foot on the ground.
There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we believe we left without having lived them: those we spent with a favourite book.
With women who do not love us, as with the dear departed, the knowledge that there is no hope left does not prevent us from continuing to wait.
Whether it is because the faith which creates has ceased to exist in me, or because reality takes shape in the memory alone, the flowers that people show me nowadays for the first time never seem to m...
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...
They reminded me that it was my fate to pursue only phantoms, creatures whose reality existed to a great extent in my imagination; for there are people - and this had been my case since youth - for wh...
There are people whose faces assume an unaccustomed beauty and majesty the moment they cease to look out of their eyes.
It is not because other people are dead that our affection for them grows faint, it is because we ourselves are dying.
I loved her [Gilberte]; I was sorry not to have had the time and the inspiration to insult her, to hurt her, to force her to keep some memory of me. I thought her so beautiful that I should have liked...
For a long time I used to go to bed early.
Habit is a second nature which prevents us from knowing the first, of which it has neither the cruelties nor the enchantments.
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,...
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 unknow...
There are few who are worthy to understand what I feel. [...] I seek out those who are of this chosen few, and I avoid the rest.
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 compl...