Quotes About Relationships

Marcel's attempts to interpret Albertine are constantly deflected—by Aimé's unreliable letters, by Albertine's misinterpreted telegrams, by Marcel's failure to recognize Gilberte at the Guermantes. All of these misreadings could be seen as part of a general comedy or tragedy of social misunderstanding and psychological failure to grasp the nature of other people, as well as one's own self.

Car ce que les gens ont fait, ils le recommencent indéfiniment. Et qu'on aille voir chaque année un ami qui les premières fois n'a pu venir à votre rendez-vous, ou s'est enrhumé, on le retrouvera avec un autre rhume qu'il aura pris, on le manquera à un autre rendez-vous où il ne sera pas venu, pour une même raison permanente à la place de laquelle il croit voir des raisons variées, tirées des circonstances.

Love teaches us much, but also it much corrupts us.

that men can be being sincere with their friends, and even with themselves, when they speak warmly of a woman's kindness to them, even though, to tell the truth, their relationship is undermined secretly, in a way they do not confess to others or which is revealed involuntarily in response to questions, to inquiries, by a painful anxiety.

But then, even in the most insignificant details of our daily life, none of us can be said to constitute a material whole, which is identical for everyone, and need only be turned up like a page in an account-book or the record of a will; our social personality is created by the thoughts of other people.

Indubitavelmente, raríssimas pessoas compreendem o caráter puramente subjetivo desse fenômeno em que consiste o amor e como é o amor uma espécie de criação de um indivíduo suplementar, distinto daquele que usa no mundo o mesmo nome, e que formamos com elementos na maioria tirados de nós mesmos. Por isso, poucos são os que podem achar naturais as proporções enormes que acaba assumindo para nós uma criatura que não é a mesma que eles veem.

Physical love, so unfairly disparaged, compels people to manifest the very smallest particles they possess of goodness, of self-abnegation, so much so that these particles glow even in the eyes of those immediately surrounding them.

To be with the people one loves, to speak to them, not to speak to them, it is all the same.

By an inverse gymnastic, I who had made a mental effort to add to Rachel all that Saint-Loup had added to her of himself, I attempted to subtract the support of my heart and mind from the composition of Albertine and to picture her to myself as she must appear to Saint-Loup, as Rachel had appeared to me. Those differences, even though we were to observe them ourselves, what importance would we attach to them

Now the memories of love are no exception to the general laws of memory, which in turn are governed by the still more general laws of Habit.

The words Gisèle's eyes promised would be spoken to me as soon as Albertine left us alone together were not to be uttered,

our social personality is created by the thoughts of other people.

notre personnalité sociale est une création de la pensée des autres. Même l'acte si simple que nous appelons « voir une personne que nous connaissons » est en partie un acte intellectuel

A cordial nature exaggerates a friend's qualities with as much pleasure as a mischievous one finds in depreciating them.

unforeseen situations force us to enter into deeper contact with ourselves, the painful dilemmas in which love places us at every instant, instruct us, disclose to us successively the matter of which we are made.

To anything that we do not know to be related to the real life of the person whom we love we pay but scant attention, we forget immediately what she has said to us about some incident or people that we do not know, and her expression while she was saying it.

But friendship does not express itself in the same way in different people.

A stranger leaves us indifferent, and indifference does not prompt us to unkind actions.

Em suma, minha tia exigia, ao mesmo tempo em que a aprovassem em seu regime, que a lamentassem por seus padecimentos e que a tranquilizassem quanto ao futuro.

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,

With Albertine, I felt that I would never learn anything, would never succeed in unraveling this tangled multiplicity of authentic details and untruthful facts. And that it would always be thus, unless I were to put her in prison (but people escape) up until the end.

Quand on aime, l'amour est trop grand pour pouvoir être contenu tout entier en nous; il irradie vers la personne aimée, rencontre en elle une surface qui l'arrête, le force à revenir vers son point de départ et c'est ce choc en retour de notre propre tendresse que nous appelons les sentiments de l'autre et qui nous charme plus qu'à l'aller, parce que nous ne reconnaissons pas qu'elle vient de nous.

She was obliged, of course, to admit that Swann was not interested in money, but she would add sulkily: "It's not the same thing, you see, with him," and, as a matter of fact, what appealed to her imagination was not the practice of disinterestedness, but its vocabulary.

do you think it possible for a woman really to be touched by a man's being in love with her, and never to be unfaithful to him?