Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.

We guess as we read, we create; everything starts from an initial error; those that follow (and this applies not only to the reading of letters and telegrams, not only to all reading), extraordinary as...

… it would even be inexact to say that I thought of those who read it as readers of my book. Because they were not, as I saw it, my readers. More exactly they were...

We have nothing to fear and a great deal to learn from trees, that vigorours and pacific tribe which without stint produces strengthening essences for us, soothing balms, and in whose gracious company we spend...

We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full.

Once he has outgrown his youth, a man will rarely remain a prisoner to his insolence. He had thought it was the only way to behave; then he suddenly discovers that, even for a prince,...

The mistakes of doctors are innumerable. They err as a rule out of optimism as to the treatment, and pessimism as to the outcome.

It is in moments of illness that we are compelled to recognize that we live not alone but chained to a creature of a different kingdom, whole worlds apart, who has no knowledge of us...

…infirmity alone makes us take notice and learn, and enables us to analyse mechanisms of which otherwise we should know nothing. A man who falls straight into bed night after night, and ceases to live...

Among all the modes by which love is brought into being, among all the agents which disseminate that blessed bane, there are few so efficacious as this gust of feverish agitation that sweeps over us...

Let us leave pretty women to men with no imagination.

Her [Odette’s] eyes were beautiful, but so large they seemed to droop beneath their own weight, strained the rest of her face and always made her appear unwell or in a bad mood.

That our words are, as a general rule, filled by the people to whom we address them with a meaning which those people desire from their own substance, a meaning widely different from that which...

… when she called to mind all this utter and crushing misery that had come upon my aunts’ old music-master, she was moved to very real grief, and shuddered to think of that other grief,...

… sterile, splendid torture of understanding and loving…

Sometimes, as Eve was born from one of Adam’s ribs, a woman was born during my sleep from a cramped position of my thigh. Formed from the pleasure I was on the point of enjoying,...

Had I been less firmly resolved upon settling down definitively to work, I should perhaps have made an effort to begin at once. But since my resolution was explicit, since within twenty-four hours, in the...

The anaesthetic effect of habit being destroyed, I would begin to think – and to feel – such melancholy things.

A real person, profoundly as we may sympathize with him, is in a great measure perceptible only through our senses, that is to say, remains opaque, presents a dead weight which our sensibilities have not...

The facts of life do not penetrate to the sphere in which our beliefs are cherished; as it was not they that engendered those beliefs, so they are powerless to destroy them.

People do not die for us immediately, but remain bathed in a sort of aura oflife which bears no relation to true immortality but through which theycontinue to occupy our thoughts in the same way...

But,instead of what our imagination makes us suppose and which we worthless try to discover,life gives us something that we could hardly imagine.

I felt that I did not really remember her except through the pain, and I longed for the nails that riveted her to my consciousness to be driven yet deeper.

At the moment when, ordinarily, there was still an hour to be lived through before meal-time sounded, we would all know that in a few seconds we should see the endives make their precocious appearance,...

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.

Lies, so often misleading and which form the substance of all conversations, are less effective in covering up a feeling of dislike or of self-interest, or a visit one would rather people did not know...

In the case of the solitary, his seclusion, even when it is absolute and ends only with life itself, has often as its primary cause a disordered love of the crowd, which so far overruled...

Yanımızdayken fazlasıyla bildik olan hayatına, birden kaçınılmaz olarak içine karışacağı başka hayatlar eklenir; belki de bizi o hayatlara karışmak için terk etmiştir. Giden kadının hayatındaki bu yeni zenginlik, geriye dönük olarak, yanımızdaki, belki de gidişini...

Like a fruit hidden among its leaves, which has grown and ripened unobserved by man, until it falls of its own accord, there came upon us one night the kitchen-maid’s confinement.

Then his jealousy rejoiced at the discovery, as though that jealousy had had an independent existence, fiercely egotistical, gluttonous of every thing that would feed its vitality, even at the expense of Swann himself.

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

… there was no need for him to hasten towards the attainment of a happiness already captured and held in a safe place, which would not escape his grasp again.

Dinner-parties bore us because our imagination is absent, and reading interests us because it is keeping us company.

Every woman feels that the greater her power over a man, the more impossible it is to leave him except by sudden flight: a fugitive precisely because a queen.

What criterion ought one to adopt to judge one’s fellows? After all, there was not a single person he knew who might not, in certain circumstances, prove capable of a shameful action.

His jealousy, like an octopus which throws out a first, then a second, and finally a third tentacle, fastened itself irremovably first to that moment, five o’clock in the afternoon, then to another, then to...

As though on a seedling whose blossoms ripen at different times, I had seen in old ladies, on that beach at Balbec, the dried-up seeds and sagging tubers that my girl-friends would become. But, now...

The creation of the world did not occur at the beginning of time, it occurs every day.

It is illness that makes us recognize that we do not live in isolation but are chained to a being from a different realm, worlds apart from us and by whom it is impossible to...

l’oubli dont je commençais à sentir la force et qui est un si puissant instrument d’adaptation à la réalité parce qu’il détruit peu à peu le passé survivant qui est en constante contradiction avec elle.

Sadists of Mlle Vinteuil’s sort are creatures so purely sentimental, so naturally virtuous, that even sensual pleasure appears to them as something bad, the prerogative of the wicked. And when they allow themselves for a...

… the good intentions of a third party are powerless to control a woman who is annoyed to find herself pursued even into a ball-room by a man whom she does not love. Too often,...

How often have I watched, and longed to imitate when I should be free to live as I chose, a rower who had shipped his oars and lay flat on his back in the bottom...

To such an extent does passion manifest itself in us as a temporary and distinct character, which not only takes the place of our normal character but actually obliterates the signs by which that character...

The inertia of the mind urges it to slide down the easy slope of imagination, rather than to climb the steep slope of introspection.

She’s an absolute idiot!” she added with the wisdom invariably shown by people who, not being in love themselves, feel that a clever man should only be unhappy about a person who is worth his...

He went farther; agonised by the reflection, at the moment when it passed by him, so near and yet so infinitely remote, that, while it was addressed to their ears, it knew them not, he...

Perhaps she would not have thought of wickedness as a state so rare, so abnormal, so exotic, one which it was so refreshing to visit, had she been able to distinguish in herself, as in...

Sometimes in the afternoon sky the moon would pass white as a cloud, furtive, lusterless, like an actress who does not have to perform yet and who, from the audience, in street clothes, watches the...

And if she had appeared, would I have dared to speak to her?