If what Proust says is true, that happiness is the absence of fever, then I will never know happiness. For I am possessed by a fever for knowledge, experience, and creation.
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Civilization is an active deposit which is formed by the combustion of the present with the past. Neither in countries without a Present nor in those without a Past is it to be encountered. Proust in Venice, Matisse's birdcages overlooking the flower market at Nice, Gide on the seventeenth-century quais of Toulon, Lorca in Granada, Picasso by Saint-Germain-des-Pr?s: there lies civilization and for me it can exist only under those liberal regimes in which the Present is alive and therefore capable of assimilating the Past.
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The real voyage of discovery consists, not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.
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The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.
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Things don't change, but by and by our wishes change.
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The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.
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... automatically, worn out by the gloomy day and by the perspective of a sad tomorrow, I put in my mouth a spoonful of tea in which I had sof...
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Let us be grateful to people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.
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A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left.
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Desire makes everything blossom possession makes everything wither and fade.
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As the Arab proverb says, The dog barks and the caravan passes. After having dropped this quotation, Mr. Norpois stopped to judge the effect it had on us. It was great; the proverb was known to us: it had been replaced that year among men of high worth by this other: Whoever sows the wind reaps the storm, which had needed some rest since it was not as indefatigable and hardy as, Working for the King of Prussia.
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We say that the hour of death cannot be forecast, but when we say this we imagine that hour as placed in an obscure and distant future. It never occurs to us that it has any connection with the day already begun or that death could arrive this same afternoon, this afternoon which is so certain and which has every hour filled in advance.
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The features of our face are hardly more than gestures which force of habit made permanent. Nature, like the destruction of Pompeii, like the metamorphosis of a nymph into a tree, has arrested us in an accustomed movement.
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If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time.
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For each illness that doctors cure with medicine, they provoke ten in healthy people by inoculating them with the virus that is a thousand times more powerful than any microbe: the idea that one is ill
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A cathedral, a wave of storm, a dancer's leap, never turn out to be as high as we had hoped.
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We are able to find everything in our memory, which is like a dispensary or chemical laboratory in which chance steers our hand sometimes to a soothing drug and sometimes to a dangerous poison.
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There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book
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As the Arab proverb says, 'The dog barks and the caravan passes'. After having dropped this quotation, Mr. Norpois stopped to judge the effect...
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[The literary figure who looms largest in] False Papers ... perfected a language ... and a vision that gave memory an introspection and aesthetic scope and magnitude no author had conferred on either before. He allowed intimacy itself to become an art form.
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The bonds that unite another person to ourselves exist only in our mind. Memory as it grows fainter relaxes them, and notwithstanding the illusion by which we would fain be cheated and with which, out of love, friendship, politeness, deference, duty, we cheat other people, we exist alone. Man is the creature that cannot emerge from himself, that knows his fellows only in himself when he asserts the contrary, he is lying.
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The time which we have at our disposal every day is elastic; the passions we feel expand it, those that we inspire contract it, and habit fills up what remains.
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A cathedral, a wave of a storm, a dancer's leap, never turn out to be as high as we had hoped
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The world was not created once and for all time for each of us individually. There are added to it in the course of our life things of which we have never had any suspicion.
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The paradoxes of today are the prejudices of tomorrow, since the most benighted and the most deplorable prejudices have had their moment of novelty when fashion lent them its fragile grace.
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A catherdral, a wave of storm, a dancer's leap, never turn out to be as high as we had hoped.
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In times like ours, where the growing complexity of life leaves us barely the time to read the newspapers, where the map of Europe has endured...
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Perhaps it is nothingness which is real and our dream which is non-existent, but then we feel think that these musical phrases, and the notion...
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That translucent alabaster of our memories.
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All our final decisions are made in a state of mind that is not going to last.
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