Quotes from Marcel Proust

Hâlâ mümkün olan bir ?eyden dakika dakika art?k mümkün olmayan bir ?eye geçi?te, insan?n göz yumup kendi eliyle derinle?tirdi?i bir ac? var.

The generals who get the most soldiers killed insist that they be well fed.

But tongues are strangely loosened and are swift to denounce people's faults when the revenge of the person accused is no longer to be feared.

We experience in our sleep many instances of Pity, like the different pietàs of the Renaissance, but unlike them ours are not carved in marble but evanescent. They have their value, however, which is to keep us in touch with a certain kinder, more humane view of things that is only too easily submerged in the chilly, even hostile good sense of the waking state.

When I talked with any one of my friends I was conscious that the original, the unique portrait of her individuality had been skilfully traced, tyranically imposed on my mind as much by the inflexions of her voice as by those of her face, and that these were two separate spectacles which rendered, each in its own plane, the same single reality.

the fact remains that there is a certain objective reality in each of these people, and consequently a difference among them.

This book of mine has not been manufactured: it has been garnered.

A mentira é essencial à humanidade. Ela desempenha entre nós um papel tão grande, talvez, quanto o da procura do prazer, e, de resto, é comandada por essa procura. Mentimos para proteger nosso prazer ou nossa honra, se por acaso a divulgação do prazer é contrária à honra. Mentimos durante a vida toda, e sobretudo, e talvez somente, àqueles que nos amam. Só estes, realmente, nos fazem recear a sorte de nosso prazer e desejar-lhes a estima.

a man of great ability will ordinarily pay less attention to other people's foolishness than would a fool.

Our love becomes immense; we never dream how small a place in it the real woman occupies. And if suddenly, as at the moment when I had seen Elstir stop to talk to the girls, we cease to be uneasy, to suffer pain, since it is this pain that is the whole of our love, it seems to us as though love had abruptly vanished at the moment when at length we grasp the prey to whose value we had not given enough thought before

I was not yet old enough, I was still too sensitive to have outgrown the desire to find favour in the sight of other people and to possess their hearts.

Choderlos de Laclos,

Those in love see renunciation in the same light: they imagine it while living in a state that is its opposite; and, never having so much as begun to try it, they cannot believe in its power of healing.

the mean and narrow outlook of the pedant, whom those who are most contemptuous of him in the impartiality of their own minds are only too prone to copy when they are obliged to play a part upon the vulgar stage of life.

We are bored at a dinner-table because our imagination is absent, and because it is bearing us company we are interested in a book.

Sadness had reigned in undisputed sovereignty over his shadowed childhood.

This calm which I had just enjoyed was the first apparition of that great intermittent force which was to wage war in me against grief, against love, and would ultimately get the better of them.

We lack the sense of our own visibility as we lack that of distances, imagining as quite close to us the interested attention of people who on the contrary never give us a thought, and not suspecting that we are at the same moment the sole preoccupation of others.

Et voici que le monde(qui n'a pas été créé une fois, mais aussi souvent qu'un artiste original est survenu) nous apparait entièrement différent de l'ancien, mais parfaitement clair.

But the mistake she made was only an extreme and desiccated instance of the countless mistakes, more trivial, more pointed, unintentional, or deliberate, that accompany our names on the particular index card the world allots us.

Among all the methods by which love is brought into being, among all the agents which disseminate that blessed bane, there are few so efficacious as the great gust of agitation which, now and then, sweeps over the human spirit. For then the creature in whose company we are seeking amusement at the moment, her lot is cast, her fate and ours decided, that is the creature whom we shall henceforward love.

I was trapped in the present, as heroes are, or drunkards; in brief eclipse, my past had ceased to project in front of me that shadow of itself which we call our future; seeing the purpose of my life not in any past dreams coming true but in the simple bliss of the passing moment, I could see no further than that moment.

At that moment I would have undertaken a mission to make Robert break with his mistress as readily as I had been to make him go and live with her permanently a few hours earlier. In the one case, Saint-Loup would have regarded me as a false friend; in the other, his family would have called me his evil genius. Yet, in that interval of a few hours, I was the same man.

Se o rosto de uma mulher é dificilmente interpretado pelos nossos olhos, que não podem aplicar-se a toda essa superfície movediça, aos lábios, mais ainda, à memória; se nuvens o alteram conforme sua posição social e conforme a altura em que estamos situados, que cortina mais espessa ainda está corrida entre os atos daquela a quem vemos, e suas razões!