Quotes About Reflection

But the true nature which we repress continues nevertheless to abide within us. Thus it is that at times, if we read the latest masterpiece of a man of genius, we are delighted to find in it all those of our own reflexions which we have despised, joys and sorrows which we have repressed, a whole world of feelings we have scorned, and whose value the book in which we discover them afresh suddenly teaches us.

That is why the better part of our memories exists outside us, in a blatter of rain, in the smell of an unaired room or of the first crackling brushwood fire in a cold grate: wherever, in short, we happen upon what our mind, having no use for it, had rejected, the last treasure that the past has in store, the richest, that which, when all our flow of tears seems to have dried at the source, can make us weep again.

And so we ought not to fear in love, as in everyday life, the future alone, but even the past, which often comes to life for us only when the future has come and gone - and not only the past which we discover after the event but the past which we have long kept stored within ourselves and suddenly learn how to interpret.

Of these multiple impressions our memory is not capable of furnishing us with an immediate picture. But that picture gradually takes shape, and, with regard to works which we have heard more than once, we are like the schoolboy who has read several times over before going to sleep a lesson which he supposed himself not to know, and finds that he can repeat it by heart next morning.

However, it was impossible for any love of mine for Andrée to be true: she was too intellectual, too highly strung, too prone to ailment, too much like myself.

A man who is in the habit of smiling in the glass at his handsome face and stalwart figure, if you shew him their radiograph, will have, face to face with that rosary of bones, labelled as being the image of himself, the same suspicion of error as the visitor to an art gallery who, on coming to the portrait of a girl, reads in his catalogue: "Dromedary resting.

Unfortunately the next day was not the vast, extraneous expanse of time which I had feverishly looked forward. When it drew to a close my laziness and my painful struggle to overcome internal obstacles had simply lasted twenty-four hours longer.

Pasaba largas horas encantadoras, a solas consigo mismo, el único invitado que olvidara invitar a comer durante su vida.

Let an illness, a duel, a runaway horse make us see death face to face, and how richly we should have enjoyed the life of pleasure, the travels in unknown lands, which are about to be snatched from us! And no sooner is the danger past than we resume once more the same dull life in which none of those delights existed for us.

real books should be the offspring not of daylight and casual talk but of darkness and silence

Queremos buscar en las cosas, que por eso nos son preciosas, el reflejo que sobre ellas lanza nuestra alma, y es grande nuestra decepción al ver que en la Naturaleza no tienen aquel encanto que en nuestro pensamiento les prestaba la proximidad de ciertas ideas; y muchas veces convertimos todas las fuerzas del alma en destreza y en esplendor, destinados a accionar, sobre unos seres que sentimos perfectamente que están fuera de nosotros y no alcanzaremos nunca.

An impression of love is out of proportion to the other impressions of life, but when it is lost in their midst we are incapable of appreciating it.

For man is that ageless creature who has the faculty of becoming many years younger in a few seconds, and who, surrounded by the walls of the time through which he has lived, floats within them as in a pool the surface-level of which is constantly changing so as to bring him within range now of one epoch, now of another.

To think that I wasted years of my life, that I wanted to die, that I felt my deepest love, for a woman who did not appeal to me, who was not my type!

As with the future, it is not all at once but grain by grain that one savours the past.

as though one's life were a series of galleries in which all the portraits of any one period had a marked family likeness, the same (so to speak) tonality — this early Swann abounding in leisure, fragrant with the scent of the great chestnut-tree, of baskets of raspberries and of a sprig of tarragon.

As by an electric current that gives us a shock, I have been shaken by my loves, I have lived them, I have felt them: never have I succeeded in seeing or thinking them.

El recordar una determinada imagen no es sino echar de menos un determinado instante, y las casas, los caminos, los paseos, desgraciadamente son tan fugitivos como los años

that distant look characteristic of people who do not wish to be agreeable...

Which drew from Bloch nothing more instructive than "Sir, I am absolutely incapable of telling you whether it has rained. I live so resolutely apart from physical contingencies that my senses no longer trouble to inform me of them." "My

además, comenzaban a ver en él esa vejez anormal, excesiva, vergonzosa y merecida de los solteros, de todas las personas para las cuales parece que el gran día que no tiene día siguiente sea más largo que para los demás, porque para ellos está vacío y los momentos van adicionándose desde la mañana sin llegar a dividirse después entre los hijos.

The places we have known do not belong only to the world of space on which we map them for our own convenience. They were only a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; the memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years

as a painter who can have his subject for short sittings only prepares his palette, and from what he remembers and from rough notes does in advance everything which he possibly can do in the sitter's absence.

We try to discover in things, which become precious to us on that account, the reflection of what our soul has projected on to them; we are disillusioned when we find that they are in reality devoid of the charm which they owed, in our minds, to the association of certain ideas.