There is no one, no matter how wise he is, who has not in his youth said
None of us constitutes a material whole, identical for everyone, which a person has only to go look up as though we were a book of specifications or a last testament; our social personality is a creat...
Love is not vain because it is frustrated, but because it is fulfilled. The people we love turn to ashes when we posess them.
Let us be grateful to people whomake us happy; they are thecharming gardeners
If we are to make reality endurable, we must all nourish a fantasy or two.
I would be astonished to find myself in a state of darkness, pleasant and restful enough for the eyes, and even more, perhaps, for my mind, to which it appeared incomprehensible, without a cause, a ma...
I felt myself still reliving a past which was no longer anything more than the history of another person;
I dined with Legrandin on the terrace of his house by moonlight. There is a charming quality, is there not, he said to me, in this silence; for hearts that are wounded, as mine is, a novelist whom you...
Happiness is salutary for the body but sorrow develops the powers of the spirit.
But sometimes illumination comes to our rescue at the very moment when all seems lost; we have knocked at every door and they open on nothing until, at last, we stumble unconsciously against the only...
That which we remember of our conduct is ignored by our closest neighbour but that which we have forgotten having said or even what we never said will cause laughter even into the next world.
I have had occasion to meet with, in convents for instance, literally saintly examples of practical charity, they have generally had the brisk, decided, undisturbed and slightly brutal air of a busy s...
This malady which Swann’s love had become had so proliferated, was so closely interwoven with all his habits, with all his actions, with his thoughts, his health, his sleep, his life, even with what h...
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.
People who, not being in love themselves, feel that a clever man should only be unhappy about a person who is worth his while; which is rather like being astonished that anyone should condescend to di...
I feel that there is much to be said for the Celtic belief that the souls of those whom we have lost are held captive in some inferior being, in an animal, in a plant, in some inanimate object, and th...
For what we suppose to be our love or our jealousy is never a single, continuous and indivisible passion. It is composed of an infinity of successive loves, of different jealousies, each of which is e...
Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself. The writer's work is only a kind of optical instrument he provides the reader so he can discern what he might never have seen in himself w...
At every new torment which is too hard to bear we feel yet another vein protrude, to unroll its sinuous and deadly length along our temples or beneath our eyes. And thus gradually are formed those ter...
And so it is with our own past. It is a labour in vain to attempt to recapture it: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile. The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach...