Quotes About Experience

La tristesse des hommes qui ont vieilli c'est de ne pas même songer à écrire de telles lettres dont ils ont appris l'inefficacité.

The names of Northern railway stations in a timetable where he would like to imagine himself stepping from the train on an autumn evening when the trees are already bare and smelling strongly in the keen air, an insipid publication for people of taste, full of names that he has not heard since childhood, may have far greater value for him than five volumes of philosophy, and lead people of taste to say that for a man of talent, he has very stupid tastes.

I had spent the New Year's Day of old men, who differ on that day from their juniors, not because people have ceased to give them presents but because they themselves have ceased to believe in the New Year.

Ces jours uniques, ils se consument par l'usage, ils ne reviennent pas, on ne peut les vivre ici quand on les a vécus là.

That is why the better part of our memories exists outside us, in a blatter of rain, in the smell of an unaired room or of the first crackling brushwood fire in a cold grate: wherever, in short, we happen upon what our mind, having no use for it, had rejected, the last treasure that the past has in store, the richest, that which, when all our flow of tears seems to have dried at the source, can make us weep again.

Les plats se lisent et les livres se mangent.

Of these multiple impressions our memory is not capable of furnishing us with an immediate picture. But that picture gradually takes shape, and, with regard to works which we have heard more than once, we are like the schoolboy who has read several times over before going to sleep a lesson which he supposed himself not to know, and finds that he can repeat it by heart next morning.

True life life at last discovered and illuminated the only life therefore really lived that life is literature.

Good God! Think of listening to Wagner for a whole fortnight with a woman who takes about as much interest in music as a tone-deaf newt - that would be fun!

it was with an unusual intensity of pleasure, a pleasure destined to have a lasting effect upon his character and conduct...

An impression of love is out of proportion to the other impressions of life, but when it is lost in their midst we are incapable of appreciating it.

For man is that ageless creature who has the faculty of becoming many years younger in a few seconds, and who, surrounded by the walls of the time through which he has lived, floats within them as in a pool the surface-level of which is constantly changing so as to bring him within range now of one epoch, now of another.

But in exchange for what our imagination leads us to expect and we give ourselves so much futile trouble trying to find, life gives us something which we were very far from imagining.

I did not distinguish the successive theories of which that uncertainty was composed any more than, when we watch a horse running, we isolate the successive positions of its body as they appear upon a bioscope. But

Later on, absence taught me far more bitter lessons: that you get accustomed to absence, that the greatest abatement of the self, the most humiliating torment is to feel that you are no longer tormented by absence.

What most enraptured me were the asparagus.

As with the future, it is not all at once but grain by grain that one savours the past.

In theory one is aware that the earth revolves, but in practice one does not perceive it, the ground upon which one treads seems not to move, and one can live undisturbed. So it is with Time in one's life.

The habit of thinking prevents us at times from experiencing reality, immunises us against it, makes it seem no more than any other thought.

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 — this early Swann abounding in leisure, fragrant with the scent of the great chestnut-tree, of baskets of raspberries and of a sprig of tarragon.

As by an electric current that gives us a shock, I have been shaken by my loves, I have lived them, I have felt them: never have I succeeded in seeing or thinking them.

It was true that Odette played vilely, but often the most memorable impression of a piece of music is one that has arisen out of a jumble of wrong notes struck by unskilful fingers upon a tuneless piano.

Sometimes it would even happen that this precocious hour would sound two strokes more than the last; there must then have been an hour which I had not heard strike; something which had taken place had not taken place for me; the fascination of my book, a magic as potent as the deepest slumber, had stopped my enchanted ears and had obliterated the sound of that golden bell from the azure surface of the enveloping silence.

Once we pass a certain age, the soul of the child we used to be and the souls of the dead from whom we spring come and scatter over us handfuls of their riches and their misfortunes, asking to bear a part in the new feelings we are experiencing: feelings which allow us, rubbing out their old effigies, to recast them in an original creation.