Quotes About Experience

By dint of drinking champagne with them, I began to feel a little of the intoxication that used to come over me at Rivebelle, though probably not quite the same. Not only every kind of intoxication, from that which the sun or travelling gives us to that which we get from exhaustion or wine, but every degree of intoxication—and each must have a different figure, like the numbers of fathoms on a chart—lays bare in us exactly at the depth to which it reaches a different kind of man.

Marcel Proust

La vraie vie, [...] c'est la littérature.

Reality is formed only by memory.

He had, indeed, one of the advantages which men who have lived and moved in society enjoy over those, however intelligent, who have not, namely that they no longer see it transfigured by the longing or repulsion which it inspires, but regard it as of no importance.

Suddenly there came a memory which I had not seen for a long time, for it had remained dissolved in the transparent, fluid expanses of my memory, until it formed into crystals.

Hâlâ mümkün olan bir ?eyden dakika dakika art?k mümkün olmayan bir ?eye geçi?te, insan?n göz yumup kendi eliyle derinle?tirdi?i bir ac? var.

But the mistake she made was only an extreme and desiccated instance of the countless mistakes, more trivial, more pointed, unintentional, or deliberate, that accompany our names on the particular index card the world allots us.

Jean would be conscious of a curious feeling that he was living simultaneously in the immediate presence of a particular day and in other similar days of long ago.

Inasmuch as a great part of what doctors know is taught them by the sick, they are easily led to believe that this knowledge which patients exhibit is common to them all, and they fondly imagine that they can impress the patient of the moment with some remark picked up at a previous bedside.

since my sorrow was directed not at what Albertine had been for me but at what my heart, desiring to participate in the more general emotions of love, had come to persuade me that she was; then I realized that this life which had so bored me—or at least so I thought—had, on the contrary, been delicious;

Memory, instead of being a duplicate always present before our eyes of the various events of our life, is rather an abyss from which at odd moments a chance resemblance enables us to draw up, restored to life, dead impressions; but even then there are innumerable little details which have not fallen into that potential reservoir of memory, and which will remain for ever beyond our control.

It is one of the most dreadful things for the lover that, while particular facts—which only the test of experience, or even spying, can verify from among so many possibilities—are so difficult to unearth, the truth, on the other hand, is so easy to discover or simply to intuit.

Mas uma lembrança, um pesar são coisas móveis. Dias há em que se vão para tão longe que mal os distinguimos e os julgamos desaparecidos. Começamos então a atentar noutras coisas.

Swann made a hobby of collecting scraps of 'real life')

In later life we look at things in a more practical way, in full conformity with the rest of society, but adolescence is the only period in which we learn anything.

Those years of my earliest childhood are no longer a part of myself; they are external to me; I can learn nothing of them save as we learn things that happened before we were born — from the accounts given me by other people.

all those other pleasures in the thick of which my imagination had enwrapped

was nevertheless still young, since I had been able to write her one, by means of which I hoped, in telling her of my solitary dreams of love and longing, to arouse similar dreams in her. The sadness of men who have grown old lies in their no longer even thinking of writing such letters, the futility of which their experience has shown.

Marcel Proust

With any one member of my little gang of girls, was I not bound to recall only the most recently glimpsed of her possible faces, given that the mind eliminates from our memories of anyone whatever does not contribute in an immediately useful way to our daily dealings with the person, even if—especially if!—these dealings are colored by a tincture of love, which, by being perpetually unsatisfied, lives forever in the coming moment?

I was awakened by the blare of a regimental band which passed every day beneath my windows. But on several occasions — and I mention these because one cannot properly describe human life unless one shews it soaked in the sleep in which it plunges, which, night after night, sweeps round it as a promontory is encircled by the sea — the intervening layer of sleep was strong enough to bear the shock of the music and I heard nothing.

Tuo metu aš buvau ?simyl?j?s teatr?, žinoma, platoniška meile, nes t?vai dar niekad nebuvo leid? man tenai nueiti, ir tok? menk? tetur?jau supratim?, kas tai per malonumas, kad bemaž tik?jau, jog teatre kiekvienas ži?ri tartum pro stereoskop? ? dekoracijas, rodomas jam vienam, nors ir visai panašias ? t?kstan?ius kit?, kurias mato visi ži?rovai, tiktai kiekvienas atskirai.

But what we call experience is only the revelation to our own eyes of one of our own character traits, which recurs naturally, and recurs all the more powerfully if we have already on some previous occasion brought it up into the clear light of consciousness, so that the spontaneous reaction which had guided us the first time becomes reinforced by all the suggestions of memory.