Quotes from Marcel Proust

Hardly even does one think of oneself, but only how to escape from oneself.

For, medicine being a compendium of the successive and contradictory mistakes of medical practioners, when we summon the wisest of them to our aid, the chances are that we may be relying on a scientific truth the error of which will be recognised in a few years' time. So that to believe in medicine would be the height of folly, if not to believe in it were not greater folly still, for from this mass of errors there have emerged in the course of time many truths.

Pois a posse do que se ama é uma alegria ainda maior do que o amor. Muitas vezes os que escondem de todos essa posse, só o fazem pelo medo de que o objeto amado lhes seja roubado. E a felicidade deles fica diminuída por aquela prudência de calar.

Ô grandes attitudes de l'homme et de la femme où cherchent à se joindre, dans l'innocence des premiers jours et avec l'humilité de l'argile, ce que la création a séparé, où Eve est étonnée et soumise devant l'homme au côté de qui elle s'éveille, comme lui-même, encore seul, devant Dieu qui l'a formé.

But if she had given them all up for me, for ever, I should perhaps have decided even more firmly never to leave her, for while jealousy makes separation difficult, gratitude makes it impossible.

Fiquei a olhá-la, a princípio com esse olhar que não é mais que o porta-voz dos olhos, mas à janela do qual se inclinam todos os sentidos, ansiosos e petrificados, olhar que desejaria tocar, capturar, trazer consigo o corpo que está mirando, e com ele a alma.

I asked myself whether marriage with Albertine would not spoil my life, as well by making me assume the burden, too heavy for my shoulders, of consecrating myself to another person, as by forcing me to live in absence from myself because of her continual presence and depriving me, forever, of the delights of solitude.

Já se disse até que o mais alto louvor a Deus reside na negação do ateu, que considera a Criação tão perfeita que dispensa um criador.

But all that is past history. With the amazing advances in artillery, the wars of the future, if there are any, will be so short that peace will have been declared before there is time to put our lessons into practice.

I would urge the driver to go as fast as he possibly could, so that the minutes might pass less slowly which I must spend without having anyone at hand to dispense me from the obligation myself to provide my sensibility

The stage scenery, still in its place, among which I was passing, seen thus at close range and without the advantage of any of those effects of lighting and distance on which the eminent artist whose brush had painted it had calculated, was a depressing sight, and Rachel, when I came near her, was subjected to a no less destructive force.

His mistress had opened his mind to the invisible, had brought an element of seriousness into his life, of delicacy into his heart, but all this escaped his sorrowing family who repeated: "That creature will be the death of him, and meanwhile she's doing what she can to disgrace him.

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 ailment succeeding one another without interruption in a family will not make it doubt the goodness of its God or the talent of its doctor.

Allt detta gjorde kyrkan i mina ögon till någonting helt annorlunda än staden i övrigt: en byggnad som, om man kan uttrycka sig så, var rest i fyra dimensioner - av vilka den fjärde var tiden - genom seklerna sträckande sitt skepp, som från travé till travé, från sidokapell till sidokapell tycktes erövra och överskrida icke endast några meter, utan den ena epoken efter den andra.

Hardly ever do we hear anything that does not make us regret something that we have said

I felt that, if I had taken some photographs of Bloch against the background of Mme de Villeparisis's salon, they would have produced an image of Israel like the images in spirit photographs—so disturbing because they do not appear to emanate from humanity, so disappointing because they nonetheless resemble humanity too closely.

Nature scarcely seems capable of giving us any but quite short illnesses. But medicine has developed the art of prolonging them.

The consolation I drew from her words may even have had, much later, far-reaching and grave consequences for me,

Mas as coisas que sabemos, temo-las, se não entre as mãos, pelo menos no pensamento, onde as dispomos à nossa vontade, o que nos dá a ilusão de uma espécie de domínio sobre elas.

Parecia-me que a natureza, menos livre que os velhos poetas, devia servir-se quase que exclusivamente dos elementos comuns à família e não podia atribuir-lhe tal poder de inovação que fizesse, com materiais análogos aos que compunham um tolo e um bruto, um grande espírito sem a menor tara de tolice, uma santa sem a menor mácula de brutalidade.

No less than my grandmother, she dreaded these invasions of strangers, and, in her fear of being too late to escape if she let herself be seen, would fly from the room with a rapidity which always made my father and me laugh at her.

Like all those who enjoy the possession of a thing, in order to know what would happen if he ceased for a moment to possess it he had removed that thing from his mind, leaving everything else in the same state as when it was there. But the absence of a thing is not merely that, it is not simply a partial lack, it is a disruption of everything else, it is a new state which one cannot foresee in the old.

Obscurely awaited, immanent and concealed, it rouses to such a paroxysm, at the moment when at last it makes itself felt, those other pleasures which we find in the tender glance, in the kiss of her who is by our side, that it seems to us, more than anything else, a sort of transport of gratitude for the kindness of heart of our companion and for her touching predilection of ourselves, which we measure by the benefits, by the happiness that she showers upon us.

This was all the more dangerous in that my nature has always made me more open to the world of the possible than to that of real-life contingencies. This approach helps one to understand the human soul, but one runs the risk of being deceived by individuals.