Quote collection
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"An hour or so later he received a note from Odette. Swann had left his cigarette case at her house. "If only," she wrote, "you had also forgotten your heart! I should never have let you have it back."
"That abominable and sensual act called reading the newspaper, thanks to which all the misfortunes and cataclysms in the universe over the last twenty-four hours, the battles which cost the lives of fifty-thousand men, the murders, the strikes, the bankruptcies, the fires, the poisonings, the suicides, the divorces, the cruel emotions of statesmen and actors, are transformed for us, who don't even care, into a morning treat, blending in wonderfully, in a particularly exciting and tonic way, with the recommended ingestion of a few sips of cafe au lait."
"The inertia of the mind urges it to slide down the easy slope of imagination, rather than to climb the steep slope of introspection."
"There's nothing like desire to prevent the things one says from having any resemblance to the things in one's mind."
"Illness is the most heeded of doctors: to goodness and wisdom we only make promises; pain we obey."
"Human altruism which is not egoism, is sterile."
"Only by art can we get outside ourselves, instead of seeing only one world, our own, we see it under multiple forms."
"The fixity of a habit is generally in direct proportion to its absurdity."
"People don't know when they are happy. They're never so unhappy as they think they are."
"...the nose is generally the organ in which stupidity is most readily displayed."
"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, after a few years we are unfaithful to what we have been, to what we wished to remain immortally."
"At the heart of our friendly or purely social relations, there lurks a hostility momentarily cured but recurring by fits and starts."
"The images selected by memory are as arbitrary, as narrow, as elusive as those which the imagination had formed and reality has destroyed. There is no reason why, existing outside ourselves, a real place should conform to the pictures in our memory rather than those in our dreams."
"No exile at the South Pole or on the summit of Mont Blanc separates us more effectively from others than the practice of a hidden vice."
"I have a horror of sunsets; they're so romantic, so operatic."
"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."
"Facts do not find their way into the world in which our beliefs reside; they did not produce our beliefs, they do not destroy them; they may inflict on them the most constant refutations without weakening them, and an avalanche of afflictions or ailments succeeding one another without interruption in a family will not make it doubt the goodness of its God or the talent of its doctor."
"Conversation, which is friendship's mode of expression, is a superficial digression which gives us nothing worth acquiring. We may talk for a lifetime without doing more than indefinitely repeat the vacuity of a minute."
"Adultery breathes new life into marriages which have been left for dead."
"A language which we do not know is a fortress sealed."