Quotes About Relationships

When one feels oneself smitten by love for a woman, one ought to say to oneself, 'What are 'her surroundings? What has been her life?' All one's future happiness lies in the answer.

Which was for me the true friend—Mme de Montmorency, so happy to ruffle my feelings and always so willing to oblige, or Mme de Guermantes, distressed at the least offense toward me and incapable of the least effort to be helpful?

I was not yet old enough, I was still too sensitive to have outgrown the desire to find favour in the sight of other people and to possess their hearts.

Choderlos de Laclos,

At that moment I would have undertaken a mission to make Robert break with his mistress as readily as I had been to make him go and live with her permanently a few hours earlier. In the one case, Saint-Loup would have regarded me as a false friend; in the other, his family would have called me his evil genius. Yet, in that interval of a few hours, I was the same man.

Which was for me the true friend, Mme. de Montmorency, so glad always to annoy me and always so ready to oblige, or Mme. de Guermantes, distressed by the slightest offence that might have been given me and incapable of the slightest effort to be of use to me?

It is the tragedy of other people that they are merely showcases for the very perishable collections of one's own mind.

brž ko ljubiš, nimaš nikogar ve? rad

but other people, as we get to know them, are like a metal dipped in an acid bath, and we see them gradually lose their good qualities (and their bad qualities too, at times).

Forgive me, Bertrand, for having on that day loved in you a beauty in which your self-esteem could take no pride, which could not in any way determine my affection.

A peculiarity of love, moreover, is that it makes us at once more mistrustful and more credulous, makes us quicker to suspect the one we love than we would have another woman, and to be readier to lend credence to her denials.

He lost his temper once only, because she cried, which he considered cowardly, unworthy of her. People are not always very tolerant of the tears which they themselves have provoked

Live with a woman altogether and you will soon cease to see any of the things that made you love her; though I must add that these two sundered elements can be reunited by jealousy

We had better stop seeing each other, life is forcing us apart." No doubt when I was writing those words to Gilberte, I was saying to myself that when I next loved, not her but some other person, the excess of my love would diminish the love that that person might otherwise feel for me, as if between two people there were inevitably a fixed amount of love, so that where one loved more the other must love less, and from that other, as from Gilberte, I should be forced one day to separate.

The problem with people is that for us they are no more than prints in our mental museum, which fade on exposure. And it is precisely because of this that they form the basis of projects illuminated by our thoughts, but thoughts tire and memories collapse: the day would come when I would happily give Albertine's room to the first girl who wanted it, as I had given Albertine the agate marble or other gifts of Gilberte's.

When one is in love one has no love left for anyone.

and though I was obliged to see her magnificent hat, at least I managed to banish from her face the signs of a joy that I ought to have been happy to share with her, but which, as so often happens while those whom we love best are still alive, can strike us as a mere irritant, a mark of something silly and small-minded, rather than the precious revelation of the happiness we long to give to them.

These are the creatures we usually fall in love with, only to suffer the more. For each new anxiety they cause us blots out from our eyes a part of their personality. We were resigned to suffering, thinking we loved something outside ourselves, and we come to realize that our love is a function of our sadness, that perhaps it is our sadness, and that its object is only to a small extent the young girl with raven hair.

When the compartments in which we live parts of our lives are too different from one another, we can expend ourselves on a person who, by the following day, may come to seem uninteresting. But we feel responsible for what we may have said the night before, and wish to honor it.

It has been said that silence is a force; in another and widely different sense it is a tremendous force in the hands of those who are loved.

Une œuvre est à la fois le souvenir de nos amours passées et la prophétie de nos amours nouvelles

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?

Every being we love, up to a point every being, is a Janus, showing us its pleasant face as it moves away from us, and its gloomy face if we know it is permanently available to us.

O]ur 'inferiors,' who love us...take pleasure in wounding us in our self-esteem.