Quotes About Illusion

We come to its aid; we falsify it by memory and by suggestion;

If I had been able to get out and speak to one of these girls we passed, I might well have been disillusioned by some flaw in her complexion that I had been unaware of from the carriage. (In that case, it would suddenly have felt impossible for me to make any effort to become part of her life. For beauty is a succession of hypotheses, and ugliness restricts these by blocking the way that seemed to be already leading us into the heart of the unknown.)

and yet I had given up hope of encountering in the street what I had come there to seek, the affection promised to me at the theater in a smile, the figure of a woman, and the bright face beneath her fair hair, which were only real when seen from a distance. Now I could not even have said what Mme de Guermantes was like, what I recognized her by, for every day, in the picture she presented as a whole, the face was as different as the dress and the hat.

The need for dreams, the desire to be made happy by the woman one has dreamed of, means that it can take no time at all to settle all one's chances of happiness on someone who a few days earlier was no more than a fortuitous, unknown, commonplace apparition on the boards of a theater.

Any life that represents something mysterious, like some last illusion to be shattered, exerts a pull on us.

she believed came from her admirer but which was due in effect to the utter impossibility of finding pleasure when one spends all one's time looking for it.

Belki de, diyordum kendi kendime, M. de Charlus'ün sap?kl???n?n ona kad?nca bir hassasiyet, bir zihinsel incelik kazand?rmas? gibi, Albertine'in de iyi yürekli, samimi tav?rlar?, onunla bir erkek arkada?la kurulan vefal? ve k?s?tlamas?z dostlu?u ya??yormu?um yan?lg?s?n? yaratan davran??lar?, gelecekteki ac?lar?m?n sebebi olan sap?kl???ndan kaynaklan?yordu.

My first impression of them had been quite the opposite: I had found them very ordinary, just like anyone else, but this was because, before actually meeting them, I had seen them, as I saw Balbec, Florence, and Parma, as magical names.

really can't understand how Robert ever came to fall in love with her," the Duchesse went on. "Oh, I know one must never discuss that sort of thing!" she added, with the charming philosophical pout of a sentimentalist who had no illusions left. "I know that anybody can fall in love with anybody else.

The valet de chambre had entered. I did not tell him that I had rung several times, for I realized that hitherto all I had done was to dream that I had rung. I was alarmed to think, however, that this dream had had the clarity of a cognition. Could cognition, by the same token, have the unreality of a dream?

We dream a great deal of paradise, or, rather, of numerous successive paradises, but they are all, long before we die, paradises lost, in which we would feel lost.

que parecía el juguete inerte y mecánico de la felicidad.

For what we suppose to be our love, our jealousy are, neither of them, single, continuous and individual passions. They are composed of an infinity of successive loves, of different jealousies, each of which is ephemeral, although by their uninterrupted multitude they give us the impression of continuity, the illusion of unity.

Our love becomes immense; we never dream how small a place in it the real woman occupies. And if suddenly, as at the moment when I had seen Elstir stop to talk to the girls, we cease to be uneasy, to suffer pain, since it is this pain that is the whole of our love, it seems to us as though love had abruptly vanished at the moment when at length we grasp the prey to whose value we had not given enough thought before

Se o rosto de uma mulher é dificilmente interpretado pelos nossos olhos, que não podem aplicar-se a toda essa superfície movediça, aos lábios, mais ainda, à memória; se nuvens o alteram conforme sua posição social e conforme a altura em que estamos situados, que cortina mais espessa ainda está corrida entre os atos daquela a quem vemos, e suas razões!

To know a thing does not enable us, always, to prevent its happening, but after all the things that we know we do hold, if not in our hands, at any rate in our minds, where we can dispose of them as we choose, which gives us the illusion of a sort of power to control them

Tuo metu aš buvau ?simyl?j?s teatr?, žinoma, platoniška meile, nes t?vai dar niekad nebuvo leid? man tenai nueiti, ir tok? menk? tetur?jau supratim?, kas tai per malonumas, kad bemaž tik?jau, jog teatre kiekvienas ži?ri tartum pro stereoskop? ? dekoracijas, rodomas jam vienam, nors ir visai panašias ? t?kstan?ius kit?, kurias mato visi ži?rovai, tiktai kiekvienas atskirai.

How paradoxical it is to seek in reality for the pictures that are stored in one's memory, which must inevitably lose the charm that comes to them from memory itself and from their not being apprehended by the senses. The reality that I had known no longer existed.

it was the moment in which a sane man who is talking to a lunatic has not yet perceived that his companion is mad

But one reads the papers as one wants to with a bandage over one's eyes without trying to understand the facts, listening to the soothing words of the editor as to the words of one's mistress. We are beaten and happy because we believe ourselves unbeaten and victorious

But the imagination goes beyond the reality in supposition.

there are few that can really be happy when we are dealing with a sentiment of such a kind that any satisfaction we can give it does no more, as a rule, than dislodge some pain. And yet sometimes a respite is granted us, and we have for a little while the illusion of being healed.

But, just as we do not possess that sense of direction with which certain birds are endowed, so we lack the sense of our own visibility as we lack that of distances, imagining as quite close to us the interested attention of the people who on the contrary never give us a thought, and not suspecting that we are at the same time the sole preoccupation of others.

Pois o que nós julgamos seja o nosso amor, o nosso ciúme, não é uma mesma paixão contínua, indivisível. Compõem-se eles de uma infinidade de amores sucessivos, de ciúmes diferentes, mas, por sua multidão ininterrupta, dão a impressão da continuidade, a ilusão da unidade.