Quotes About Experience

The only true voyage would be not to travel through a hundred different lands with the same pair of eyes, but to see the same land through a hundred different pairs of eyes.

So, by the working of a contradiction that was one only in appearance, it was at the very moment when I experienced an exceptional pleasure, when I sensed that my life could be one of fulfillment, and should therefore have seen it as having increased in value, that I felt liberated from the anxieties it had hitherto inspired in me, and was prepared to commit it without hesitation to the unsure hands of chance.

And so it is with our own past. It is a labour in vain to recapture it: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile. The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) which we do not suspect. And as for that object, it depends on chance whether we come upon it or not before we ourselves must die.

Happiness contracted by the cold, forced to withdraw into itself, to close into its heart, it is there that I find the greatest intensity. It is true that I have only ever experienced it through sadness. But it is always the same.

We are not provided with wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can take for us, an effort which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world.

When I saw any external object, my consciousness that I was seeing it would remain between me and it, enclosing it in a slender, incorporeal outline which prevented me from ever coming directly in contact with the material form; for it would volatilise itself in some way before I could touch it, just as an incandescent body which is moved towards something wet never actually touches moisture, since it is always preceded, itself, by a zone of evaporation.

No days, perhaps, of all our childhood are ever so fully lived are those that we had regarded as not being lived at all: days spent wholly with a favourite book.

Porque la mejor parte de nuestra memoria está fuera de nosotros, en una brisa húmeda de lluvia, en el olor cerrado de un cuarto o en el perfume de una primera llamarada: allí dondequiera que encontremos esa parte de nosotros mismos de que no dispuso, que desdeñó nuestra inteligencia, esa postrera reserva del pasado, la mejor, la que nos hace llorar una vez más cuando parecía agotado todo el llanto.

And in myself, too, many things have perished which, I imagined, would last for ever, and new structures have arisen, giving birth to new sorrows and new joys which in those days I could not have foreseen, just as now the old are difficult of comprehension.

so in that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann's park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and of its surroundings, taking their proper shapes and growing solid, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea.

An hour is not merely an hour, it is a vase filled with perfumes, with sounds, with projects, with climates. What we call reality is a relation between those sensations and those memories which simultaneously encircle us … that unique relation which the writer must discover in order that he may link two different states of being together forever in a phase.

As a man with imagination you can enjoy only in regret or in anticipation—that is, in the past or in the future.

What we feel is the only thing that exists for us, and we project it into the past, into the future, without letting ourselves be stopped by the fictitious barriers of death.

As a rule it is with our being reduced to a minimum that we live; most of our faculties lie dormant because they can rely upon Habit, which knows what there is to be done and has no need of their services. But on this morning of travel, the interruption of the routine of my existence, the unfamiliar place and time, had made their presence indispensable.

But one never finds a cathedral, a wave in a storm, a dancer's leap in the air quite as high as one has been expecting;

La vraie vie, la vie enfin découverte et éclaircie, la seule vie par conséquent pleinement vécue, c'est la littérature.

Yet a single sound, a single scent, already heard or breathed long ago, may once again, both in the present and the past, be real without being present, ideal without being abstract, as soon as the permanent and habitually hidden essence of things is liberated, and our true self, which may sometimes have seemed to be long dead, but never was entirely, is re-awoken and re-animated when it receives the heavenly food that is brought to it.

We do not include the pleasures we enjoy in sleep in the inventory of the pleasures we have experienced in the course of our existence.

É, de resto, uma das coisas mais terríveis para o apaixonado que, sendo os fatos particulares - que só a experiência, a espionagem, entre tantas realizações possíveis, dariam a conhecer - tão difíceis de descobrir, a verdade, em compensação, seja tão fácil de conhecer ou, em todo caso, de pressentir.

Life is a hard thing that presses us too tightly, forever hurting our souls. Upon feeling those restraints loosen for a moment, one can experience clear-sighted pleasures.

genius, having the widest experience of the human intelligence, can best understand the ideas most directly in opposition to those which form the foundation of its own works.

What had to move - a leaf of the chestnut tree, for instance - moved.

We need, between us and the fish which, if we saw it for the first time cooked and served on a table, would not appear worth the endless shifts and wiles required to catch it, the intervention, during our afternoons with the rod, of the rippling eddy to whose surface come flashing, without our quite knowing what we intend to do with them, the bright gleam of flesh, the hint of a form, in the fluidity of a transparent and mobile azure.

And even before my brain, lingering in consideration of when things had happened and of what they had looked like, had sufficient impressions to enable it to identify the room, it, my body, would recall from each room in succession what the bed was like, where the doors were, how daylight came in at the windows, whether there was a passage outside, what I had had in my mind when I went to sleep, and had found there when I awoke.