Illness is the most heeded of doctors: to kindness and wisdom we make promises only; pain we obey.
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 som...
Asparagus, tinged with ultramarine and rosy pink which ran from their heads, finely stippled in mauve and azure, through a series of imperceptible changes to their white feet, still stained a little b...
All our final decisions are made in a state of mind that is not going to last.
Until I saw Chardin's painting I never realized how much beauty lay around me in my parents' house in the half-cleared table in the corner of a tablecloth left awry in the knife beside the empty o...
It is always thus, impelled by a state of mind which is destined not to last, we make our irrevocable decisions
In my cowardice I became at once a man, and did what all we grown men do when face to face with suffering and injustice; I preferred not to see them
We are all of us obliged, if we are to make reality endurable, to nurse a few little follies in ourselves.
This was not to say, however, that she did not long, at times, for some greater change, that she did not experience some of those exceptional moments when one thirsts for something other than what is,...
The idea of popular art, like that of a patriotic art, if not actually dangerous seemed to me ridiculous. If the intention was to make art accessible to the people by sacrificing refinements of form,...
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. For it al...
Only, we must allow time. But our demands as far as time is concerned are no less exorbitant than those which the heart requires in order to change. For one thing, time is the very thing that we are l...
Most of our faculties lie dormant because they can rely upon Habit, which knows what there is to be done and has no need of their services.
Mais, quand d’un passé ancien rien ne subsiste, après la mort des êtres, après la destruction des choses, seules, plus frêles mais plus vivaces, plus immatérielles, plus persistantes, plus fidèles, l’...
It is not only by dint of lying to others, but also of lying to ourselves, that we cease to notice that we are lying.
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 beca...
وأدركتُ المجال الذى يصطدم به الحب، إننا نتخيل كموضوع له، كائناً يمكن أن يتمدّد أمامنا، منغلقاً ضمن جسد، يا للحسرة، ان امتداد هذا الكائن إلى كل النقط فى الزمان والمكان هو ما شغله ويشغله. وإن لم نتملك ص...
When the heartstrings, which contentment has silenced, like a harp laid by, yearn to be plucked and sounded again by some hand, however rough, even if it should break them;
While Elstir, at my request, went on painting, I wandered about in the half-light, stopping to examine first one picture, then another.Most of those that covered the walls were not what I should chief...
What best remind us of a person is precisely what we had forgotten (because it was of no importance, and we therefore left it in full possession of its strength). That is why the better part of our me...