Quotes About Love

And I might, in order to justify myself, have told her that I loved her. But the confession of that love, apart from the fact that it could not have told Albertine anything new, would perhaps have made her colder to myself than the harshness and deceit for which love was the sole excuse. To be harsh and deceitful to the person whom we love is so natural!

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.

happy that the satisfaction of his curiosity had left their love intact and that after having simulated a sort of indifference toward Odette for so long, he had not given her, by his jealousy, that proof of loving her too much which, between two lovers, exempts forever after, from loving enough, the one who receives

28. Comment j'aimerais mourir. — Meilleur et aimé. 29. État présent de mon

But the most important thing to admit is this: although, on the one hand, lying is often a trait of character, it is, on the other hand, in women who would not otherwise be liars, a natural defense, at first spontaneous and then gradually more organized, against that sudden danger which is capable of destroying anyone's life: love.

If I have always been so much interested in dreams, is it not because, compensating duration with intensity they help us to understand better what is subjective in love?

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.

He knew himself so little that he doubtless imagined that he was in love with her, perhaps indeed that he would be in love with her always

But you are our equal, if not our superior," the Guermantes seemed, in all their actions, to be saying; and they said it in the most courteous fashion imaginable, to be loved, admired, but not to be believed; that one should discern the fictitious character of this affability was what they called being well-bred; to suppose it to be genuine, a sign of ill-breeding.

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?

But above all my anguish was incomparably stronger this time, for many reasons, of which the most important was not perhaps that I had never tasted sensual pleasure with Mme de Guermantes or with Gilberte, but that since I did not see them every hour of every day and had no opportunity, and consequently experienced no need, to do so, my love for them lacked the all-powerful element of Habit.

Because the different chance events which bring us into contact with certain people do not coincide with the time during which we are in love with them, but, extending beyond it, may occur before it begins and repeat themselves after it has ended, the earliest appearances in our lives of a person destined later to captivate us assume retrospectively in our eyes the significance of a warning, a presage. This

really can't understand how Robert ever came to fall in love with her," the Duchesse went on. "Oh, I know one must never discuss that sort of thing!" she added, with the charming philosophical pout of a sentimentalist who had no illusions left. "I know that anybody can fall in love with anybody else.

Sleep is divine but by no means stable; the slightest shock makes it volatile. A friend to habit, it is kept night after night in tis appointed place by habit, more steadfast than itself, protected from any possible disturbance; but if it is displaced, if it is no longer subjugated, it melts away like a vapour. It is like youth and love, never to be recaptured.

Life is strewn with these miracles for which people who love can always hope.

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.

For me high society is only a means to an end. It offers vulgar but invincible weapons, and if I want to be loved someday, I have to possess them.

I thought of you, of our walks you made so delightful, while tremendous fights were going on for the capture of a hillock you loved and where so often we had been together. Probably you, like myself, are unable to imagine that obscure Roussainville and tiresome Méséglise, whence our letters were brought and where one went to fetch the doctor when you were ill, are now celebrated places

In order to deploy the means necessary to ensure her return, I was condemned to act once more as if I were not in love with her and were not suffering from her departure, I was condemned to continue lying to her—not that I had ever been very successful with this course of action, but because I had always adopted it since I had been in love with Albertine.

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.

Pois desde que se está enamorado, todos os pequenos privilégios desconhecidos que a gente possui, desejaria poder divulgá-los à mulher a quem ama, como fazem na vida os deserdados e os importunos. Sentimos que ela os ignore, procuramos consolar-nos dizendo conosco mesmos que, justamente porque não são jamais visíveis, talvez ela acrescente à ideia que tem de nós essa possibilidade de vantagens desconhecidas.

The contempt which my father had for my kind of intelligence was so far tempered by his natural affection for me that, in practice, his attitude towards anything that I might do was one of blind indulgence.

Let us simply recall the wish to appear natural and forthcoming, the instinctive movement to conceal a secret lovers' meeting, a mixture of modesty and ostentation, the need to speak of what is so pleasant to ourselves and to show that we are loved, a partial understanding of what the other person already knows, or guesses, which, outrunning or falling short of his understanding, constantly over- or under-estimates it, the involuntary drive to take risks or to cut one's losses.

To think that I have wasted years of my life, that I have longed for death, that the greatest love that I have ever known has been for a woman who did not please me, who was not in my style!