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,...

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…

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,...

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...

… 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.

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?

Love is space and time made perceptible to the heart.

… 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.

Among all the methods by which love is brought into being, among all the agents which disseminate that blessed bane, there are few so efficacious as the great gust of agitation which, now and then,...

The best vaccine against anger is to watch others in its throes.

It is the same in life; the heart changes, and that is our worst misfortune; but we learn of it only from reading or by imagination; for in reality its alteration, like that of certain...

She poured out Swann’s tea, inquired “Lemon or cream?” and, on his answering “Cream, please,” said to him with a laugh: “A cloud!” And as he pronounced it excellent, “You see, I know just how...

… that distant look characteristic of people who do not wish to be agreeable…

For in this way Swann was kept in the state of painful agitation which had once before been effective in making his interest blossom into love, on the night when he had failed to find...

We don’t receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.

Everything that seems imperishable tends to extinguishment.

It is the tragedy of other people that they are merely showcases for the very perishable collections of one’s own mind.

And if Francoise then, inspired like a poet with a flood of confused reflections upon bereavement, grief, and family memories, were to plead her inability to rebut my theories, saying: “I don’t know how to...

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...

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...