Quotes About Relationships

It was she whom I loved and whom I could not therefore see without that anxiety, without that desire for something more, which destroys in us, in the presence of the person we love, the sensation of loving.

In short, my aunt demanded that whoever came to see her must at one and the same time approve of her way of life, commiserate with her in her sufferings, and assure her of ultimate recovery.

Aliás, se o ciúme nos ajuda a descobrir certo pendor para a mentira na mulher que amamos, centuplica ele esse pendor quando a mulher descobre que somos ciumentos. Ela mente (em proporções como nunca nos tinha mentido antes), ou por pena, ou por medo, ou se furta instintivamente por uma fuga simétrica às nossas investigações.

A woman whom we love seldom satisfies all our needs, and we deceive her with a woman we do not love.

Every person whom we love, indeed to a certain extent every person is to us like Janus, presenting to us the face that we like if that person leaves us, the repellent face if we know him or her to be perpetually at our disposal.

Those who have played a big part in one's life very rarely disappear from it suddenly for good. They return to it at odd moments … before leaving it for good.

And indeed when we are no longer in love with women whom we meet after many years, is there not the abyss of death between them and ourselves, just as much as if they were no longer of this world, since the fact that we are no longer in love makes the people that they were or the person that we were then as good as dead?

Other people are, as a rule, so immaterial to us that, when we have entrusted to any one of them the power to cause so much suffering or happiness to ourselves, that person seems at once to belong to a different universe, is surrounded with poetry, makes of our lives a vast expanse, quick with sensation, on which that person and ourselves are ever more or less in contact.

And it is perhaps one of the causes of our perpetual disappointments in love, this perpetual displacement whereby, in response to our expectation of the ideal person whom we love, each meeting provides us with a person in flesh and blood who yet contains so little trace of our dream.

Not that the clear perception of certain weaknesses in those whom we love in any way diminishes our affection for them; rather that affection makes us find those weaknesses charming.

The truth, even more, is that life is perpetually weaving fresh threads which link one individual and one event to another, and that these threads are crossed and recrossed, doubled and redoubled to thicken the web, so that between any slightest point of our past and all the others a rich network of memories gives us an almost infinite variety of communicating paths to choose from.

When we are in love, our love is too vast to be wholly contained within ourselves; it radiates outwards, reaches the resistant surface of the loved one, which reflects it back to its starting-point; and this return of our own tenderness is what we see as the other's feelings, working their new, enhanced charm on us, because we do not recognize them as having originated in ourselves.

With the girls, on the other hand, if the pleasure which I enjoyed was selfish, at least it was not based on the lie which seeks to make us believe that we are not irremediably alone and prevents us from admitting that, when we chat, it is no longer we who speak, that we are fashioning ourselves then in the likeness of other people and not of a self that differs from them.

As coisas de que falamos o mais das vezes em tom de gracejo são geralmente, ao contrário, as que incomodam, mas não queremos mostrá-lo, com talvez a esperança inconfessada de uma vantagem suplementar: de justamente a pessoa com quem conversamos, ouvindo-nos gracejar daquilo, pensar que não é verdade.

She was capable of causing me pain, but no longer any joy. Pain alone kept my wearisome attachment alive.

The truth is that as we grow older we kill all those who love us by the cares we give them, by the anxious tenderness we inspire in them and constantly arouse.

The disgust of distinguished people for snobs who want to force themselves upon them, the virile man has for the invert, the woman for every man who is too much in love with her.

he loved sincerity, but only as he might love a pimp who could keep him in touch with the daily life of his mistress.

Creer que una persona participa de una vida incógnita, cuyas puertas nos abriría su cariño, es todo lo que exige el amor para brotar, lo que más estima, y aquello por lo que cede todo lo demás.

No es resultado de la casualidad que los hombres intelectuales y sensibles se entreguen siempre a mujeres insensibles e inferiores y les tengan, sin embargo, apego, si la prueba de que no son amados no los cura en absoluto de sacrificarlo todo por conservar junto a ellos a una mujer así

For in order to really suffer at the hands of a woman one must have believed in her completely.

For every death is a simplification of existence for the others, removes the necessity to show gratitude, the obligation to pay visits.

People often say that, by pointing out to a man the faults of his mistress, you succeed only in strengthening his atachment to her, because he does not believe you.

Certainly, it is more reasonable to devote one's life to women than to postage stamps, old snuff-boxes, or even to paintings and statues.