How Proust Can Change Your Life

by Alain de Botton

In reality, every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument which he offers to the reader to enable him to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have experienced in himself. And the recognition by the reader in his own self of what the book says is the proof of its veracity.

‘When two people part it is the one who is not in love who makes the tender speeches.’

‘Love is an incurable disease.’ ‘In love, there is permanent suffering.’ ‘Those who love and those who are happy are not the same.’

We cannot be taught wisdom, we have to discover it for ourselves by a journey which no one can undertake for us, an effort which no one can spare us.