Quotes About Life

People praise to us the sweetness, the purity of a virgin. But quite soon one feels that something spicier would be more appealing and one advises her to be bolder in her manners. In herself, was she rather one than the other? Perhaps not, but capable of taking on so many different forms in the rushing current of life.

How many times in the course of my life reality had disappointed me because at the moment when I perceived it, my imagination, which was my only means of enjoying beauty, could not be applied to it by virtue of the inevitable law which only allows us to imagine that which is absent.

My happiness and my life needed Albertine to be virtuous, thus they had posited once for all that she was. Armed with this salutary faith, I could safely allow my mind to play sadly with the suppositions which it formulated without believing in them. I thought, "Perhaps she does love women," as one thinks, "I might die during the night"; we say the words to ourselves, but we do not believe them, we make plans for the morrow.

The reason why life may be judged to be trivial, although at certain moments to us, it seems so beautiful, is that we form our judgement ordinarily, not on the evidence of life itself, but of the mental images which preserve nothing of life and therefore, we judge it disparagingly.

this early Swann in whom I can distinguish the charming mistakes of my childhood, and who, incidentally, is less like his successor than he is like the other people I knew at that time, as though one's life were a series of galleries in which all the portraits of any one period had a marked family likeness, the same (so to speak) tonality

La muraille de l'escalier où je vis monter le reflet de sa bougie n'existe plus depuis longtemps. En moi aussi bien des choses ont été détruites que je croyais devoir durer toujours, et de nouvelles se sont édifiées, donnant naissance à des peines et à des joies nouvelles que je n'aurais pu prévoir alors, de même que les anciennes me sont devenues difficiles à comprendre.

Our love of life is no more than an old affair that we do not know how to discontinue. Its strength lies in its permanence. But death, which interrupts it, will cure us of our desire for immortality.

friends being friends only in the sense of a sweet madness which overcomes us in life and to which we yield, though at the back of our minds we know it to be the error of a lunatic who imagines the furniture to be alive and talks to it)

You know," I said to her as we got back into the carriage, "the life of a resort and the life of travel make me realize that the theater of the world has fewer sets at its disposal than actors, and fewer actors than 'situations.

bij alles wat het stempel draagt van de werkelijke dood, die zo verschilt van zijn logische en abstracte mogelijkheid ...

My mother had not forgotten the sad end of M. Vinteuil's life, his complete absorption, first in having to play both mother and nursery-maid to his daughter, and, later, in the suffering which she had caused him;

No doubt it is because memories do not remain true for ever, and because life is made up of the endless renewal of cells, that love is not eternal.

For existence is of little interest save on days when the dust of realities is mingled with magic sand, when some trivial incident becomes a springboard for romance. Then a whole promontory of the inaccessible world emerges from the twilight of dream and enters our life, our life in which, like the sleeper awakened, we actually see the people of whom we had dreamed with such ardent longing that we had come to believe that we should never see them except in our dreams

For every death is for others a simplification of life, it spares them the necessity of showing gratitude, the obligation of paying calls.

Bizim için büyülü anahtarlar? olan içimizdeki derin, nüfuz edemeyece?imiz yerlerin kap?lar?n? açan yol gösterici oldu?u sürece, okuman?n ya?am?m?zdaki rolü sa??lt?c?d?r.

This fleetingness of persons who are not known to us, who force us to put out from the harbour of life, in which the women whose society we frequent have all, in course of time, laid bare their blemishes, urges us into that state of pursuit in which there is no longer anything to arrest the imagination. But to strip our pleasures of imagination is to reduce them to their own dimensions, that is to say to nothing.

there is a way of separating one's dreams from one's life which so often produces good results that I ask myself whether one ought not, at all costs, to try it, simply as a preventive, just as certain surgeons make out that we ought, to avoid the risk of appendicitis later on, to have all our appendices taken out when we are children.

It is the same in life; the heart changes, and that is our worst misfortune ; but we learn of it only from reading or by imagination ; for in reality its alteration, like that of a certain natural phenomena, is so gradual that, even if we are able to distinguish, successively, each of its different states, we are still spared the actual sensation of change.

Look: each moment is a cradle and a casket: may all life and all death seem strange to you.

Look: each moment is a cradle and a casket: may all life and all death seem strange and new to you.

Say not: I live today, I shall die tomorrow. Divide not reality between life and death. Say: now I live and die.

Ne dis pas : je vis maintenant, je mourrai demain. Ne divise pas la réalité entre la vie et la mort. Dis : maintenant je vis et je meurs.

No juegues con los muertos y no acaricies sus rostros. No te rías de ellos y no los llores; olvídalos. No te fíes de las cosas pasadas. No te pongas a construir bellos ataúdes para los momentos pasados: piensa en matar los momentos que vendrán. Desconfía de todos los cadáveres. No abraces a los muertos: pues ahogan a los vivos.

The Word is alive. We have always known it. But it needs to be uttered, aloud or in the mind of a reader. Without a consciousness to tickle them into life, those books were dead.