Other people are, as a rule, so immaterial to us that, when we have entrusted to any one of them the power to cause so much suffering or happiness to ourselves, that person seems at...

He stood gazing at her; traces of the old fresco were apparent in her face and limbs, and these he tried incessantly, afterwards, to recapture, both when he was with Odette, and when he was...

One morning indeed, I felt a sudden misgiving that she not only had left the house but had gone for good: I had just heard the sound of a door which seemed to me to...

Presently, one after another, like shyly hopping sparrows, her friends arrived, black against the snow.

I must choose to cease from suffering or to cease from loving.

Why, when we regain consciousness, is it not an identity other than the one we had previously that is embodied in us? It is not clear what dictates the choice nor why, among the millions...

But one never finds a cathedral, a wave in a storm, a dancer’s leap in the air quite as high as one has been expecting;

I wished to see storms only on those coasts where they raged with most violence…

And like an aviator who rolls painfully along the ground until, abruptly, he breaks away from it, I felt myself being slowly lifted towards the silent peaks of memory.

It was the quartets of Beethoven (numbers 12,13,14, and 15) which over fifty years, created and expanded the the audience of listeners to the quartets of Beethoven, thus achieving, as all masterpieces do, progress if...

…we need to bear in mind that our opinion of other people, our ties with friends or family, have only the semblance of fixity and are, in fact, as eternally fluid as the sea.

We needed germans in Paris to hear Wagner.

And in myself, too, many things have perished which, I imagined, would last for ever, and new structures have arisen, giving birth to new sorrows and new joys which in those days I could not...

It is often simply from lack of creative imagination that we do not go far enough in suffering.

One wants to be understood because one wants to be loved, and one wants to be loved because one loves.

But it is always easy to put together stories about a past which nobody any longer remembers, like those about journeys to countries where nobody has ever been.

… the serpent hissing between the lips of Envy is so huge, and so completely fills her wide-opened mouth that the muscles of her face are strained and contorted,…

… the glow of a sunset more lasting, more roseate. more human – filling, perhaps, with romantic wonder the thoughts of some solitary lover, wandering in the street below and brought to a standstill before...

… I should have been struck down by the despair a young lover feels who has sworn lifelong fidelity, when a friend speaks to him of the other mistresses he will have in time to...

Their arrogance protected them against any liking for their fellow-man, against the slightest interest in the strangers sitting all about them, amidst whom M. de Stermaria adopted the manner one has in the buffet-car of...

We don’t receive wisdom we must discover it for ourselves.

There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we believe we left without having lived them, those we spent with a favorite book.

She [Mme des Laumes] belonged to that half of the human race in whom the curiosity the other half feels about the people it does not know is replaced by an interest in the people...

It may well have been, too, that the smiling moderation with which she faced and answered these blasphemies, that this tender and hypocritical rebuke appeared to her frank and generous nature as a particularly shameful...

… Odette seemed a fascinating and desirable woman, the attraction which her body held for him had aroused a painful longing to secure the absolute mastery of even the tiniest particles of her heart.

So few are the easy victories as the ultimate failures.

I walked past her, thinking: Is this what happens to the youth of women? Those whom we have met in the past, if suddenly we desire to see them again, have they become old? Is...

My aunt must have been perfectly well aware that she would not see Swann again, that she would never leave her own house any more, but this ultimate seclusion seemed to be accepted by her...

… like an entirely cloudless sky when one is going mountaineering…

Car ce que nous croyons notre amour, notre jalousie, ce n’est pas une même passion continue, indivisible. Ils se composent d’une infinité d’amours successifs, de jalousies différentes et qui sont éphémères, mais par leur multitude...

Now there is one thing I can tell you: you will enjoy certain pleasures you would not fathom now. When you still had your mother you often thought of the days when you would have...

… he was like a man into whose life a woman, whom he has seen for a moment passing by, has brought a new form of beauty, which strengthens and enlarges his own power of...

… the courage of one’s opinions is always a form of calculating cowardice in the eyes of the ‘other side’…

Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.

The so-called sensitivity of neurotics develops along with their egotism; they cannot bear for other people to flaunt the sufferings with which they are increasingly preoccupied themselves.

But even with respect to the most insignificant things in life, none of us constitutes a material whole, identical for everyone, which a person has only to go look up as though we were a...

With women who do not love us, as with the “dear departed,” the knowledge that there is no hope left does not prevent us from continuing to wait.

…the nose is generally the organ in which stupidity is most readily displayed.

The reality that I had known no longer existed. The places that we have known belong now only to the little world of space on which we map them for our own convenience. None of...

She [Mme Sazerat] did not offer her hand, but smiled at my mother with vague melancholy as one smiles at a playmate from one’s childhood, but with whom all connection has been severed because she...

Our vanity, our passions, our spirit of imitation, our abstract intelligence, our habits have long been at work, and it is the task of art to undo this work of theirs, making us travel back...

She observed the dumb-show by which her neighbour was expressing her passion for music, but she refrained from copying it. This was not to say that, for once that she had consented to spend a...

So difficult is it for us to know, with the dead as with the living, whether a thing would cause them joy or sorrow!

It is a mistake,” Labruyère tells us, “to be in love without an ample fortune.

We imagine always when we speak that it is our own ears, our own mind, that are listening. The truth which one puts into one’s words does not carve out a direct path for itself,...

I have had occasion to meet with, in convents for instance, literally saintly examples of practical charity, they have generally had the brisk, decided, undisturbed and slightly brutal air of a busy surgeon, the face...

Whenever she saw in others an advantage, however trivial, which she herself lacked, she would persuade herself that it was no advantage at all, but a drawback, and would pity so as not to have...

… a constant repetition and a boundless incongruity of useless but indestructible objects.

… an excellent but an eccentric man in whom the least little thing would, it seemed, often check the flow of his spirits and divert the current of his thoughts.

After luncheon the sun, conscious that it was Saturday, would blaze an hour longer in the zenith,…