In Search of Lost Time [volumes 1 to 7]

by Marcel Proust

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;

And so, when Bergotte had to express an opinion which was the opposite of my own, he in no way reduced me to silence, to the impossibility of framing any reply, as M. de Norpois would have done. This does not prove that Bergotte’s opinions were of less value than the Ambassador’s; far from it. A powerful idea communicates some of its strength to him who challenges it.

Being itself a part of the riches of the universal Mind, it makes its way into, grafts itself upon the mind of him whom it is employed to refute, slips in among the ideas already there, with the help of which, gaining a little ground, he completes and corrects it; so that the final utterance is always to some extent the work of both parties to a discussion.

We are all of us obliged, if we are to make reality endurable, to nurse a few little follies in ourselves.

For, like desire, regret seeks not to be analysed but to be satisfied.

As soon as one is unhappy one becomes moral.

youth was the only time in which we learned anything.

I marvelled how the world, with an utter disregard of truth, ascribes tenderness of heart to people whose hearts are in reality so hard and dry, provided only that they behave with common courtesy to the brilliant members of their own sets.

In the human race the frequency of the virtues that are identical in us all is not more wonderful than the multiplicity of the defects that are peculiar to each one of us.

Undoubtedly, it is not common sense that is “the commonest thing in the world”; but human kindness.

Mme. de Sévigné was after all less to be pitied than most of us. She spent a great part of her life with the person whom she loved.”

The hard and fast lines with which we circumscribe love arise solely from our complete ignorance of life.”

A photograph acquires something of the dignity which it ordinarily lacks when it ceases to be a reproduction of reality and shews us things that no longer exist.

Besides, sir, the greatest folly of all is to laugh at or to condemn in others what one does not happen oneself to feel.

namely, that in the state of mind in which we ‘observe’ we are a long way below the level to which we rise when we create.

and to a good son his father is always the best of fathers, quite apart from any objective reason there may be for admiring him.

I was inclined to overrate the simplest pleasures because of the difficulties that sprang up in the way of my attaining them.

in spite of all I might say, I had been created to enjoy, pre-eminently, the pleasures of the mind,

Perhaps some of the greatest masterpieces were written yawning.”

For just as it is not the desire to become famous but the habit of being laborious that enables us to produce a finished work, so it is not the activity of the present moment but wise reflexions from the past that help us to safeguard the future.

but the omission of a particular memory, like that of part of a sentence when we are reading, leads sometimes not to uncertainty but to a birth of certainty that is premature.

But since we were still at an age when enthusiasm cannot keep silence,

“When the mind has a tendency to dream, it is a mistake to keep dreams away from it, to ration its dreams. So long as you distract your mind from its dreams, it will not know them for what they are; you will always be being taken in by the appearance of things, because you will not have grasped their true nature. If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time.

For while an event for which we are longing never happens quite in the way we have been expecting, failing the advantages on which we supposed that we might count, others present themselves for which we never hoped, and make up for our disappointment;

“There is no man,” he began, “however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived in a way the consciousness of which is so unpleasant to him in later life that he would gladly, if he could, expunge it from his memory. And yet he ought not entirely to regret it, because he cannot be certain that he has indeed become a wise man — so far as it is possible for any of us to be wise — unless he has passed through all the fatuous or unwholesome incarnations by which that ultimate stage must be preceded.

for existence to us is hardly interesting save on the days on which the dust of realities is shot with magic sand,

I tried to find beauty there where I had never imagined before that it could exist, in the most ordinary things, in the profundities of ‘still life.’

In the same way, too, do we come with amazement upon lines that we know by heart in a poem in which we never dreamed that they were to be found.

For he was one of those people who can never be ‘doing nothing,’ although there was nothing, for that matter, that he could ever be said to do.

For what people have once done they will do again indefinitely,

it is the aggregate of these qualities that goes by the name of tact.

Riches were for her, so to speak, a necessary condition of virtue, failing which virtue itself would lack both merit and charm.

What is far off may be more familiar to us than what is quite near.