Quotes About Reflection

there is always less egoism in pure imagination than in recollection;

The end of a book's wisdom appears to us as merely the start of our own, so that at the moment when the book has told us everything it can, it gives rise to the feeling that it has told us nothing.

There are some faces which take on an unaccustomed beauty and majesty the moment they no longer have a gaze.

But we have looked too far ahead, for all this did not happen until after the Verdurins' party which we have interrupted, and we must go back to the point at which we left off.

for as the dead exist only in us, it is ourselves that we strike without ceasing when we persist in recalling the blows that we have dealt them.

Mas uma lembrança, um pesar são coisas móveis. Dias há em que se vão para tão longe que mal os distinguimos e os julgamos desaparecidos. Começamos então a atentar noutras coisas.

timpul meu nu-i chiar atît de pre?ios; cel care l-a f?cut, nu ni l-a vîndut.

La filosofia parla spesso di atti liberi e di atti necessari. Forse non ve n'è nessuno più completamente subìto da noi di quello che, in virtù di una forza ascensionale compressa durante l'azione, fa, quando il nostro pensiero è in riposo, risalire così un ricordo livellato agli altri dalla forza oppressiva della distrazione, e slanciarsi, perché a nostra insaputa esso conteneva più degli altri un fascino di cui ci accorgiamo soltanto ventiquattro ore dopo.

We had better stop seeing each other, life is forcing us apart." No doubt when I was writing those words to Gilberte, I was saying to myself that when I next loved, not her but some other person, the excess of my love would diminish the love that that person might otherwise feel for me, as if between two people there were inevitably a fixed amount of love, so that where one loved more the other must love less, and from that other, as from Gilberte, I should be forced one day to separate.

not nearly smart enough for such a very smart man.

Il devient dangereux au contraire quand, au lieu de nous éveiller à la vie personnelle de l'esprit, la lecture tend à se substituer à elle, quand la vérité ne nous apparaît plus comme un idéal que nous ne pouvons réaliser que par le progrès intime de notre pensée et par l'effort de notre cœur...

Per vaim rectam,

She remembered all the years in which my grandmother and she had refrained from speaking to me about my work and the need for a healthier way of life which, I used to say, the agitation into which their exhortations threw me alone prevented me from beginning, and which, notwithstanding their obedient silence, I had failed to pursue.

Those years of my earliest childhood are no longer a part of myself; they are external to me; I can learn nothing of them save as we learn things that happened before we were born — from the accounts given me by other people.

M. Verdurin replied in a hasty tone and with an embittered groan, not of grief but of irritated impatience: "Why yes, of course, but what's to be done about it, it's no use crying over spilt milk, talking about him won't bring him back to life, will it?

all those other pleasures in the thick of which my imagination had enwrapped

Reading is at the threshold of our inner life; it can lead us into that life but cannot constitute it.

When the compartments in which we live parts of our lives are too different from one another, we can expend ourselves on a person who, by the following day, may come to seem uninteresting. But we feel responsible for what we may have said the night before, and wish to honor it.

linked all of a sudden to places from which I had thought it quite distinct, lost its mystery and took up its place in the region, leading me to reflect in terror that Mme Bovary and La Sanseverina9 would perhaps have struck me as creatures like any other had I come across them anywhere except in the enclosed atmosphere of a novel.

was nevertheless still young, since I had been able to write her one, by means of which I hoped, in telling her of my solitary dreams of love and longing, to arouse similar dreams in her. The sadness of men who have grown old lies in their no longer even thinking of writing such letters, the futility of which their experience has shown.

Marcel Proust

Une œuvre est à la fois le souvenir de nos amours passées et la prophétie de nos amours nouvelles

With any one member of my little gang of girls, was I not bound to recall only the most recently glimpsed of her possible faces, given that the mind eliminates from our memories of anyone whatever does not contribute in an immediately useful way to our daily dealings with the person, even if—especially if!—these dealings are colored by a tincture of love, which, by being perpetually unsatisfied, lives forever in the coming moment?

O olhar de Robert, com efeito, parecia por momentos atingir uma profundidade que abandonava em seguida, como um mergulhador que tocou o fundo. Esse fundo, que tanto mal fazia a Robert quando o tocava que ele o deixava imediatamente para voltar um instante depois, era a lembrança de que havia rompido com a sua amante.