Quotes About Reflection

But never again would I be able to erase that contraction from her face, or that suffering from her heart, or, rather, from my own; for, since the dead exist only in us, it is ourselves that we strike unrelentingly when we persist in remembering the blows we have dealt them. I clung to these sorrows, however cruel they might be, with all my strength, for I felt that they were the effect of my memory of my grandmother, the proof that this memory which I had was indeed present in me.

Meus pobres pilriteirinhos!", dizia eu, chorando. "Vocês, só vocês não me dariam pesar, não me obrigariam a partir! Nunca me fizeram mal! Sempre hei de querer bem a vocês." E enxugando os olhos, eu lhes prometia, para quando fosse grande, não imitar a vida insensata dos outros homens, e, até mesmo em Paris, nos dias de primavera, em vez de ir fazer visitas e ouvir tolices, sair para os campos a ver as primeiras flores de pilriteiro.

Et chaque fois la lâcheté qui nous détourne de toute tâche difficile, de toute oeuvre importante, m'a conseillé de laisser cela, de boire mon thé en pensant simplement à mes ennuis d'aujourd'hui, à mes désirs de demain qui se laissent remâcher sans peine.

Now the memories of love are no exception to the general laws of memory, which in turn are governed by the still more general laws of Habit.

Persuadé que mes pensées eussent paru pure ineptie à cet esprit parfait, j'avais tellement fait table rase de toutes, que quand par hasard il m'arriva d'en rencontrer, dans tel livres, une que j'avais déjà eue moi-même, mon cœur se gonflait comme si un Dieu dans sa bonté me l'avait rendue, l'avait déclarée légitime et belle.

Genius lies in reflective power, and not in the intrinsic quality of the scene reflected.

time would come when I should have to digest the cakes that I took without noticing them.

The only true paradises are the paradises that we have lost.

C'est le malheur des êtres de n'être pour nous que des planches de collections fort usables dans notre pensée.

my body ... faithful guardian of a past which my mind should never have forgotten, brought back before my eyes ....

an icy shudder convulsed his body and he burst into sobs. He did not wish to know why, but dried his eyes, saying with a smile: "This is delightful; I'm becoming neurasthenic.

Once in my room I had to stop every loophole, to close the shutters, to dig my own grave as I turned down the bed-clothes, to wrap myself in the shroud of my nightshirt.

Let the intellect get to work; in the course of it there will be more than enough sorrows to enable him to finish it.

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

unforeseen situations force us to enter into deeper contact with ourselves, the painful dilemmas in which love places us at every instant, instruct us, disclose to us successively the matter of which we are made.

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.

in that blinding light of the beach by which social distinctions are altered,

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

But we learn nothing from any lesson because we have not the wisdom to work backwards from the particular to the general, and imagine ourselves always to be going through an experience which is without precedents in the past

in my spell of uncertainty as to where I was...

I would feel the satisfaction of being shut in from the outer world...

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

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

By dint of drinking champagne with them, I began to feel a little of the intoxication that used to come over me at Rivebelle, though probably not quite the same. Not only every kind of intoxication, from that which the sun or travelling gives us to that which we get from exhaustion or wine, but every degree of intoxication—and each must have a different figure, like the numbers of fathoms on a chart—lays bare in us exactly at the depth to which it reaches a different kind of man.