Quotes About Life

Real life, life finally uncovered and clarified, the only life in consequence lived to the full, is literature. Life in this sense dwells within all ordinary people as much as the artist. But they do not see it because they are not trying to shed light on it.

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.

If the idea of death during this period had, as we have seen, cast a gloom over love, the memory of love had for a long time now helped me not to be afraid of death. For I understood that dying was not something new but quite the reverse, that since my childhood I had already died a number of times.

We accept so many commitments in regard to life that a time comes when, despairing of ever managing to fulfill them all, we face the graves, we call upon death, "death, which brings help to destinies that have trouble coming true." But while death may exempt us from commitments we have made in regard to life, it cannot exempt us from our commitments to ourselves, especially the most important one: namely, the commitment to live in order to be worthy and deserving.

May my life someday be so limpid that the Muses will deign to mirror themselves in it and that we can see the reflections of their smiles and their dances skimming across its surface.

No doubt, having developed the habit, out of idleness, of each day putting off my work until the day after, I thought that death could be dealt with in the same way.

an admitted insensibility or immorality simplifies life as much as does easy virtue; it converts reproachable actions, for which one no longer need seek any excuse, into a duty imposed by sincerity.

He now looked death in the face and no longer beheld the scenes that would surround his death. He wanted to remain like that until the end, no longer prey to his lies, which, by trying to bring him a beautiful and wonderful agony, would have added the last straw to his profanations by soiling the mysteries of his death just as it had concealed from him the mysteries of his life.

How much better life seemed to me now that it seemed susceptible of being illuminated, taken out of the shadows, restored from our ceaseless falsification of it to the truth of what it was, in short, realized in a book! How happy the writer of a book like that would be, I thought, what a labour awaited him!

Fortunately, life, which was more powerful than their mockery and whose sweet and strengthening milk he had not fully drained, held out its breast to dissuade him. And he resumed drinking with a joyous voracity, his rich and credulous imagination listening naïvely to the grievances of that ravenousness and making wonderful amends for its blighted hopes.

They say that Death embellishes its victims and exaggerates their virtues, but in general it is actually life that wronged them. Death, that pious and irreproachable witness, teaches us, in both truth and charity, that in each man there is usually more good than evil.

His strength was restored and, with it, all his desires to live; he went out, began living again, and died a second time for himself.

endowing the imperfect and the preterite with all the sweetness which there is in generosity, all the melancholy which there is in love; guided the sentence that was drawing to an end towards that which was waiting to begin, now hastening, now slackening the pace of the syllables so as to bring them, despite their difference in quantity, into a uniform rhythm, and breathed into this quite ordinary prose a kind of life, continuous and full of feeling.

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.

After the suicide of my thoughts, they admired my intelligence; they doted on my mind. My parched imagination, my dried-up sensitivity were enough for the people who were the thirstiest for an intellectual life—their thirst being as artificial and mendacious as the source from which they believed they were quenching it!

Like many other men, Swann had a naturally lazy mind and lacked imagination. He knew perfectly well as a general truth that human life is full of contrasts, but in the case of each individual human being he imagined all that part of his or her life with which he was not familiar as being identical with the part with which he was. He imagined what was kept secret from him in the light of what was revealed.

But in compensation for what our imagination leaves us wanting and we give ourselves so much unnecessary trouble in trying to find, life does give us something which we were very far from imagining.

Proust's life changed due to a very large inheritance he received (in today's terms, a principal of about $6 million, with a monthly income of about $15,000).

En realidad, esos sollozos no cesaron nunca; y porque la vida va callándose cada vez más en torno mío, es por lo que los vuelvo a oír, como esas campanillas de los conventos tan bien veladas durante el día pro el rumor de la ciudad, que parece que se pararon, pero que tornan a tañer en el silencio de la noche.

Ambition is more intoxicating than fame; desire makes all things blossom, possession wilts them; it is better to dream your life than to live it, even if living it means dreaming it, though both less mysteriously and less vividly, in a murky and sluggish dream, like the straggling dream in the feeble awareness of ruminant creatures.

Life is like that little sweetheart. We dream it and we love it in dreaming it. We should not try to live it: otherwise, like that little boy, we will plunge into stupidity, though not at one swoop, for in life everything degenerates by imperceptible nuances. At the end of ten years we no longer recognize our dreams; we deny them, we live, like a cow, for the grass we are grazing on at the moment. And who knows if our wedding with death might not lead to our conscious immortality?

Comme nous ne sommes tous, nous les vivants, que des morts qui ne sont pas encore entrés en fonctions, toutes ces politesses, toutes ces salutations dans le vestibule que nous appelons déférence, gratitude, dévouement et où nous mêlons tant de mensonges, sont stériles et fatigantes.

For Man to tell how human life began is hard; for who himself beginning knew?

Gratitude bestows reverence, allowing us to encounter everyday epiphanies, those transcendent moments of awe that change forever how we experience life and the world.