Quotes About Time

Ideas are substitutes for sorrows; when the latter change into ideas they lose part of their noxious action on our hearts and even at the first instant their very transformation disengages a feeling of joy. Substitutes only in the order of time, however, for it would seem that the first element is idea and that sorrow is only the mode in which certain ideas first enter us.

social, and even individual differences are merged when seen from a distance in the uniformity of an epoch.

it had arrested for all eternity the moment which it had been trying to make pass more quickly.

Il y a des jours montueux et malaisés qu'on met un temps infini à gravir et des jours en pente qui se laissent descendre à fond de train en chantant.

could still believe in their possible presence; for memory was now set in motion;

Words do not change their meanings so drastically in the course of centuries as, in our minds, names do in the course of a year or two.

recalling our life in the old days at Combray with my great-aunt, at Balbec, Paris, Doncières, Venice, and the rest;

By the last days of December, it had come to seem likely that I would receive such a letter. Whether it was really likely or not, our desire for such a letter, our need for it, is enough to make us believe it will probably come. The soldier is convinced that an indefinitely extendable period must elapse before he will be killed, the thief before he will be arrested, all of us before we must die.

Carus Amicus Mussaeus, Ah! Quod tempus, bonus Deus, Landerirette Imbre sumus perituri. And La Moussaye reassures him with: Securae sunt nostrae vitae Sumus enim Sodomitae Igne tantum perituri Landeriri.

I realised that the passing of time does not necessarily bring about progress in the arts.

the morrow would not be different from all the days that had gone before;

The time which we have at our disposal every day is elastic; the passions expand it, those that we inspire contract it; and habit fills up what remains.

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

Marcel Proust

Distances are only the relation of space to time and vary with that relation.

there comes in all lives a time, towards which you still have far to go, when the weary eyes can endure but one kind of light, the light which a fine evening like this prepares for us in the stillroom of darkness, when the ears can listen to no music save what the moonlight breathes through the flute of silence.

Distances are only the relation of space to time and vary with that relation. We express the difficulty that we have in getting to a place in a system of miles or kilometres which becomes false as soon as that difficulty decreases.

it was only at that moment—more than a year after her burial, because of the anachronism which so often prevents the calendar of facts from corresponding to the calendar of feelings—that I became conscious that she was dead.

Reality is formed only by memory.

That purpose allows the chain of spent days to slip away, holding on only to the very end of it, often of a quite different metal from the links that have vanished in the night, and in the journey which we make through life, counts as real only in the place in which we at any given moment are.

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!

Suddenly there came a memory which I had not seen for a long time, for it had remained dissolved in the transparent, fluid expanses of my memory, until it formed into crystals.

Hâlâ mümkün olan bir ?eyden dakika dakika art?k mümkün olmayan bir ?eye geçi?te, insan?n göz yumup kendi eliyle derinle?tirdi?i bir ac? var.

Jean would be conscious of a curious feeling that he was living simultaneously in the immediate presence of a particular day and in other similar days of long ago.