Quotes About Emotions

When you come to live with a woman, you will soon cease to see anything of what made you love; though it is true that the two sundered elements can be reunited by jealousy.

One wants to be understood because one wants to be loved, and one wants to be loved because one loves.

People often say that, by pointing out to a man the faults of his mistress, you succeed only in strengthening his atachment to her, because he does not believe you.

His life and family circle changed considerably between 1900 and 1905. In February 1903, Proust's brother Robert married and left the family apartment. His father died in September of the same year. Finally, and most crushingly, Proust's beloved mother died in September 1905.

As soon as jealousy is discovered, it is regarded by the person who is its object as a challenge which justifies deception.

It is a mistake to speak of a bad choice in love, since as soon as there is a choice it can only be a bad one.

I should have been struck down by the despair a young lover feels who has sworn lifelong fidelity, when a friend speaks to him of the other mistresses he will have in time to come.

I had indeed suffered successively through Gilberte, through Mme de Guermantes, through Albertine. Successively also I had forgotten them and only my love, dedicated at different times to different beings, had lasted.

The wretchedness of ordinary life, endured so gaily when it is part of our normal existence, is made far worse when it comes as something new, and is exaggerated by the working of the imagination.

A real person, profoundly as we may sympathize with him, is in a great measure perceptible only through our senses, that is to say, remains opaque, presents a dead weight which our sensibilities have not the strength to lift. If some misfortune comes to him, it is only in one small section of the complete idea we have of him that we are capable of feeling any emotion; indeed it is only in one small section of the complete idea he has of himself that he is capable of feeling any emotion either.

With the wisdom of people not in love who believe a man of sense should be unhappy only over a person who is worth it; which is rather like being surprised that anyone should condescend to suffer from cholera because of so small a creature as the comma bacillus.

So difficult is it for us to know, with the dead as with the living, whether a thing would cause them joy or sorrow!

I was not one man only but the steady advance hour after hour of an army in close formation, in which there appeared, according to the moment, impassioned men, indifferent men, jealous men.

An excellent but an eccentric man in whom the least little thing would, it seemed, often check the flow of his spirits and divert the current of his thoughts.

It is not enough in love, as in everyday life, to fear only the future: one must fear the past, which often becomes real to us only after the future, and I am not simply speaking of the past about which we learn only after the event, but of the one we have carried within us for many years, and which we only now learn to read.

It is strange how a first love, by the lesions it leaves on our heart, may open the way for later loves, but yet fail to offer us, in the identical character of our symptoms and sufferings, the means of curing them.

he said to himself that people did not know when they were unhappy, that they were never so happy as they supposed.

What attaches us to other human beings is the thousand tiny roots, the innumerable threads formed by memories of the previous evening, hopes for the following morning; it is this continuous web of habit from which we cannot extricate ourselves

They locked gazes, showing their souls on the edge of their pupils, their melancholy and passionate souls, which death was unable to unite.

Alexis was now accustomed to his uncle's fatal disease as we are to all things that last around us; and because he had once made his nephew cry as the dead make us cry, the boy, even though his uncle was still alive, treated him like a dead man: he had begun to forget him.

Ideas are substitutes for sorrows...

but they knew, either instinctively or from their own experience, that our early impulsive emotions have but little influence over our later actions and the conduct of our lives; and that regard for moral obligations, loyalty to our friends, patience in finishing our work, obedience to a rule of life, have a surer foundation in habits solidly formed and blindly followed than in these momentary transports, ardent but sterile.

C'est la vie qui peu à peu, cas par cas, nous permet de remarquer que ce qui est le plus important pour notre coeur, ou pour notre esprit, ne nous est pas appris par le raisonnement mais par des puissances autres.

When Jean and his mother left Etreuilles, Monsieur Sureau had gathered for them great boxfuls of hawthorn and of snowballs which Madame Santeuil had not the courage to refuse. But, as soon as Jean's uncle had gone home, she threw them away, saying that they already had more than enough in the way of luggage. And then Jean cried because he had been separated from the darling creatures which he would have liked to take with him to Paris, and because of his mother's naughtiness.