Quote collection
429 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"I was left alone there in the company of the orchids, roses and violets, which, like people waiting beside you who do not know you, preserved a silence which their individuality as living things made all the more striking, and warmed themselves in the heat of a glowing coal fire."
"Just as those who practice the same profession recognize each other instinctively, so do those who practice the same vice."
"We are at times too ready to believe that the present is the only possible state of things."
"Time passes, and little by little everything that we have spoken in falsehood becomes true."
"If only for the sake of elegance, I try to remain morally pure."
"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." This tea had indeed seemed to Swann, just as it seemed to her; something precious, and love has such a need to find some justification for itself, some guarantee of duration, in pleasures which without it would have no existence and must cease with its passing."
"Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself."
"People wish to learn to swim and at the same time to keep one foot on the ground."
"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 one through which we can enter the kingdom we have sought in vain a hundred years - and it opens."
"It is always during a passing state of mind that we make lasting resolutions."
"The places we have known do not belong solely to the world of space in which we situate them for our greater convenience. They were only a thin slice among contiguous impressions which formed our life at that time; the memory of a certain image is but regret for a certain moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fleeting, alas, as the years."
"For women who do not love us, as for the "disappeared", knowing that we no longer have any hope does not prevent us form continuing to wait. We live on our guard, on watch; women whose son has gone asea on a dangerous exploration imagine at any minute, although it has long been certain that he has perished, that he will enter, miraculously saved, and healthy."
"It's odd how a person always arouses admiration for his moral qualities among the relatives of another with whom he has sexual relations. Physical love, so unjustifiably decried, makes everyone show, down to the least detail, all he has of goodness and self-sacrifice, so that he shines even in the eyes of those nearest to him."
"Illness is the doctor to whom we pay most heed; to kindness, to knowledge, we make promise only; pain we obey."
"I understood that all the material of a literary work was in my past life, I understood that I had acquired it in the midst of frivolous amusements, in idleness, in tenderness and in pain, stored up by me without my divining its destination or even its survival, as the seed has in reserve all the ingredients which will nourish the plant."
"When from a long distant past nothing subsists after the things are broken and scattered, the smell and taste of things remain."
"The only paradise is paradise lost."
"A little insomnia is not without its value in making us appreciate sleep, in throwing a ray of light upon that darkness."
"I do my intellectual work inside myself, and once I am with my fellow creatures it is more or less a matter of indifference to me whether or not they are intelligent as long as they are kind, sincere, etc."
"It is not because other people are dead that our affection for them grows faint, it is because we ourselves are dying."