Quotes About Reflection

motionless, gazing, breathing, endeavouring to penetrate with my mind beyond the thing seen or smelt.

Hardly even does one think of oneself, but only how to escape from oneself.

I asked myself whether marriage with Albertine would not spoil my life, as well by making me assume the burden, too heavy for my shoulders, of consecrating myself to another person, as by forcing me to live in absence from myself because of her continual presence and depriving me, forever, of the delights of solitude.

I would urge the driver to go as fast as he possibly could, so that the minutes might pass less slowly which I must spend without having anyone at hand to dispense me from the obligation myself to provide my sensibility

Hardly ever do we hear anything that does not make us regret something that we have said

This water lily was the same, and it was also like one of those miserable creatures whose singular torment, repeated indefinitely throughout eternity, aroused the curiosity of Dante, who would have asked the tormented creature himself to recount its cause and its particularities at greater length had Virgil, striding on ahead, not forced him to hurry after immediately, as my parents did me.

The fact is that they probably regarded aesthetic merits as material objects which an open eye could not help perceiving, without one's needing to ripen equivalents of them slowly in one's own heart.

un val neobi?nuit de oameni ie?i?i la plimbare umplea înc? str?zile din Combray, înnegrindu-le parc?. ?i în fa?a fiec?rei case… servitorii sau chiar st?pînii, a?eza?i ?i privind, tiveau parc? pragurile cu o broderie capricioas? ?i întunecat? ca aceea pe care o deseneaz? algele ?i scoicile zvîrlite pe malul m?rii de un flux puternic.

but beneath the words and thoughts of an ungrateful, selfish, and cruel young man there had never been anything that might resemble my grandmother, for, in my frivolity, my love of pleasure, and accustomed as I was to seeing her as an invalid, I contained within me the memory of what she had been only in a virtual state.

If we press for a definition of what their admirers mean by the epithet, we shall find that it is generally applied to some unusual picture of a familiar object, a picture different from those that we are accustomed to see, unusual and yet true to nature, and for that reason doubly impressive to us because it startles us, makes us emerge from our habits and at the same time brings us back to ourselves by recalling to us an earlier impression.

The past not merely is not fugitive, it remains present.

Because I seemed to recognize the same sorts of sadness I had experienced in connection with Gilberte—or on those occasions in Combray when Mama had not stayed in my room, and also when I recalled certain pages of Bergotte

Die Erinnerung an ein bestimmtes Bild ist wehmutsvolles Gedenken an einen bestimmten Augenblick; und Häuser, Straßen, Avenuen sind flüchtig, ach! Wie die Jahre.

An artist has no need to express his thought directly in a work for the work to reflect its quality; it has even been said the highest praise of God is to be found in the denial of him by the atheist, who considers creation to be perfect enough to dispense with a creator.

We do not know where to find what we seek; and often we avoid for a long time the very place to which others, for other reasons, invite us, not knowing that it is the very spot where we could meet the one who is in our thoughts.

But memories and griefs are fleeting things.

Je fis comme eux avec cet air naturel d'un libre-penseur dans une église, lequel ne connaît pas la messe, mais se lève quand tout le monde se lève et se met à genoux un peu après que tout le monde s'est mis à genoux.

All the more because situations, while repeating them

Me vuelvo hacia mi alma. Ella es la que tiene que dar con la verdad.

whether one day "Guermantes" itself may survive as anything other than a place-name, except to archaeologists who stop briefly in Combray,

A book is the product of a different self from the one we manifest in our habits, in society, in our vices. If we mean to try to understand this self it is only in our inmost depths, by endeavoring to reconstruct it there, that the quest can be achieved.

On ne reçoit pas la sagesse, il faut la découvrir soi-même après un trajet que personne ne peut faire pour nous, ne peut nous épargner.

Uma renúncia não é sempre total desde o princípio, quando a decidimos com a nossa alma antiga e antes de que, em reação, tenha ela agido sobre nós, quer se trate da renúncia de um doente, de um monge, de um artista, de um herói.

A philosopher who was not sufficiently modern for her, Leibniz, has said that the journey from the intellect to the heart is a long one.