How Proust Can Change Your Life (Vintage International)

by Alain de Botton

Like every obstacle in the way of possessing something…, poverty, more generous than opulence, gives women far more than the clothes they cannot afford to buy: the desire for those clothes which creates a genuine, detailed, thorough knowledge of them.

To make [reading] into a discipline is to give too large a role to what is only an incitement. Reading is on the threshold of the spiritual life; it can introduce us to it: it does not constitute it.