Quotes About Existence

it had arrested for all eternity the moment which it had been trying to make pass more quickly.

three women each of whom I had once loved, I said to myself that our social existence is, like an artist's studio, filled with abandoned sketches in which we have fancied for a moment that we could set down in permanent form our need of a great love, but it did not occur to me that sometimes, if the sketch be not too old, it may happen that we return to it and make of it a work wholly different, and possibly more important than what we had originally planned.

A imobilidade das coisas que nos cercam talvez lhes seja imposta por nossa certeza de que essas coisas são elas mesmas e não outras, pela imobilidade de nosso pensamento perante elas.

Ni siquiera desde el punto de vista de las cosas más insignificantes de la vida somos los hombres un todo materialmente constituido, idéntico para todos, y del que cualquiera puede enterarse como de un pliego de condiciones o de un testamento. Nuestra personalidad social es una creación del pensamiento de los demás.

Reality is formed only by memory.

such suffering, owed to her, in compensation, the possibility of receiving the strange call which had come to me and which I would never again cease to hear—as it were the promise that something else existed, something perhaps reachable through art, besides the nothingness that I had found in all pleasures, and even in love, and that even if my life seemed so empty, at least it was not over.

That purpose allows the chain of spent days to slip away, holding on only to the very end of it, often of a quite different metal from the links that have vanished in the night, and in the journey which we make through life, counts as real only in the place in which we at any given moment are.

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.

Talvez o nada é que seja a verdade e todo o nosso sonho não exista, mas sentimos então que essas frases musicais, essas noções que existem em função do sonho, não hão de ser nada tampouco. Pereceremos, mas temos como reféns essas divinas cativas que seguirão a nossa sorte. E a morte com elas tem alguma coisa de menos amargo, de menos inglório, de menos provável, talvez.

timpul meu nu-i chiar atît de pre?ios; cel care l-a f?cut, nu ni l-a vîndut.

In a world thronged with monsters and with gods, we are barely conscious of tranquillity.

And by a strange coincidence, that reasoned fear of danger was born at the very moment when the idea of death had become indifferent to me. The fear of no longer existing had formerly horrified me at each new love I experienced—for Gilberte, for Albertine—because I could not bear the thought that one day the being who loved them might not be there; it was a sort of death. But the very recurrence of this fear led to its changing into calm confidence.

Art extracted from the most familiar reality does indeed exist and its domain is perhaps the largest of any.

C'est peut-être de la même manière qu'une sorte de bouture prélevée sur un être, et greffée au cœur d'un autre, continue à y poursuivre sa vie, même quand l'être d'où elle avait été détachée a péri.

But Mme. de Cambremer-Legrandin spent part of the year in the country. Even in Paris, being an invalid, she was largely confined to her own room. It is true that the drawbacks of this mode of existence were noticeable chiefly in her choice of expressions which she supposed to be fashionable and which would have been more appropriate to the written language, a distinction that she did not perceive, for she derived them more from reading than from conversation.

And so it is with our own past. It is a labour in vain to attempt 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.

it was like what used to be called a panopticon but a panopticon of years, a view not of a monument but of a person situated in the modifying perspective of Time.

O trabalho de causalidade, que acaba por produzir quase todos os efeitos possíveis, e por conseguinte também aqueles que havíamos julgado menos viáveis, esse trabalho é às vezes lento, tornando-se ainda um pouco mais lento devido ao nosso desejo - que, procurando acelerá-lo, o entrava - e também devido à nossa própria existência, e só se realiza depois de termos deixado de desejar e, muitas vezes, de viver.

Umutsuzlu?a kap?lmak için, art?k ancak bedbaht olabilecek bu hayata ba?l? olmam?z gerekir.

Then it would begin to seem unintelligible, as the thoughts of a former existence must be to a reincarnate spirit; the subject of my book would separate itself from me, leaving me free to choose whether I would form part of it or no; and at the same time my sight would return and I would be astonished to find myself in a state of darkness, pleasant and restful enough for the eyes, and even more, perhaps, for my mind, to which it appeared incomprehensible

just as Eve was created from a rib of Adam, so a woman would come into existence while I was sleeping, conceived from some strain in the position of my limbs. Formed

The laborious process of causation which sooner or later will bring about every possible effect, including (consequently) those which one had believed to be most nearly impossible, naturally slow at times, is rendered slower still by our impatience (which in seeking to accelerate only obstructs it) and by our very existence, and comes to fruition only when we have ceased to desire it—have ceased, possibly, to live.

Perhaps we shall lose them, perhaps they will be obliterated, if we return to nothing in the dust. But so long as we are alive, we can no more bring ourselves to a state in which we shall not have known them than we can with regard to any material object, than we can, for example, doubt the luminosity of a lamp that has just been lighted, in view of the changed aspect of everything in the room, from which has vanished even the memory of the darkness.