Quotes About Relationships

His life and family circle changed considerably between 1900 and 1905. In February 1903, Proust's brother Robert married and left the family apartment. His father died in September of the same year. Finally, and most crushingly, Proust's beloved mother died in September 1905.

As soon as jealousy is discovered, it is regarded by the person who is its object as a challenge which justifies deception.

It is a mistake to speak of a bad choice in love, since as soon as there is a choice it can only be a bad one.

A person has no need of sincerity, nor even of skill in lying, in order to be loved. Here I mean by love reciprocal torture.

I should have been struck down by the despair a young lover feels who has sworn lifelong fidelity, when a friend speaks to him of the other mistresses he will have in time to come.

I had indeed suffered successively through Gilberte, through Mme de Guermantes, through Albertine. Successively also I had forgotten them and only my love, dedicated at different times to different beings, had lasted.

we know from our own shortcomings, towards other people, how little an oath is worth. And we have deliberately believed them when they came from her, the very person to whose interest it has always been to lie to us, and whom, moreover, we did not select for her virtues.

When the successive hours of our life are thus displayed against too widely dissimilar backgrounds, we find that we give away too much of ourselves to all sorts of people who next day will not interest us in the least

I was not one man only but the steady advance hour after hour of an army in close formation, in which there appeared, according to the moment, impassioned men, indifferent men, jealous men.

I do my intellectual work within myself, and once with other people, it's more or less irrelevant to me that they're intelligent, as long as they are kind, sincere etc."

Relations which are not consecrated by the laws establish bonds of kinship as manifold, as complex, even more solid than those which spring from marriage.

what brings men together is not a community of views but a consanguinity of minds.

There are few who are worthy to understand what I feel... I seek out those who are of this chosen few, and I avoid the rest.

Our belief that a person takes part in an unknown life which his or her love would allow us to enter is, of all that love demands in order to come into being, what it prizes the most, and what makes it care little for the rest.

It is strange how a first love, by the lesions it leaves on our heart, may open the way for later loves, but yet fail to offer us, in the identical character of our symptoms and sufferings, the means of curing them.

Now my uncle knew many of them [actresses] personally, and also ladies of another class, not clearly distinguished from actresses in my mind.

What attaches us to other human beings is the thousand tiny roots, the innumerable threads formed by memories of the previous evening, hopes for the following morning; it is this continuous web of habit from which we cannot extricate ourselves

The horror that grand people have for the snobs who strive so hard to make their acquaintance is also felt by masculine men for inverts, and by women for every man who is too much in love with them.

Even his mother, his own mother, had once accused him of being a snob.

If fruitful love, meant to perpetuate the race, noble as a familial, social, human duty, is superior to purely sensual love, then there is no hierarchy of sterile loves, and such a love is no less moral - or, rather, it is no more immoral for a woman to find pleasure with another woman than with a person of the opposite sex.

Una certa somiglianza esiste, pur evolvendosi, fra le donne che via via amiamo, e dipende dalla fissità del nostro temperamento il quale, assumendosi l'incarico di sceglierle, elimina tutte quelle che non siano per noi, ad un tempo, opposte e complementari, vale a dire atte a soddisfare i nostri sensi e a far soffrire il nostro cuore.

Now my uncle knew many of them personally, and also ladies of another class, not clearly distinguished from actresses in my mind. He used to entertain them at his house.

We do not tremble except for ourselves, or for those whom we love.

The illusions of paternal love are perhaps no less poignant than those of the other kind; many daughters regard their fathers merely as the old men who leave their fortunes to them.