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"He had so long since ceased to direct his life toward any ideal goal, and had confined himself to the pursuit of quotidian satisfactions, that he had come to believe, though without ever formally stating his belief even to himself that he would remain all his life in that condition, which only death could alter."
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"Life is an intricate play with actors waiting for an explanation. Each added act confers a new interpretation of the story. ['Waiting for the pieces to fall into place']"
"By freeze-framing the image of our lifestyle, by stopping our mental clock at times and letting time flow, 'psychological' time can replace 'chronological' time and our human condition can be called into question. This opens the door to a new challenge and a new future. ['Svp "ArrAat sur image']"
"And the great owners, who had become through the might of their holdings both more and less than men."
"A Man of wisdom is one who discusses everything other than his achievements, a Fool speaks only of his achievements."
"Everything is true,' he said. 'Everything anybody has ever thought.''Will you be all right?''I'll be all right,' he said, and thought, And I'm going to die. Both those are true, too."
"If you think this Universe is bad, you should see some of the others."
"We human beings are created and yet we are more rational than the creator himself who spawned us."
"Just because something bears the aspect of the inevitable one should not, therefore, go along willingly with it."
"When God broke his deal with me, I turned to the Devil. In the end, I wasn't happy. I realized that the imagination of a perfect being was more limited than that of the imperfect one. Color me unimpressed by the Actus Purus."
"Do we use thoughts as a medium to convey our emotions, or use our emotions to convey thoughts!"
Explore more quotes by Marcel Proust
"The flowers which played then among the grass, the water which rippled past in the sunshine, the whole landscape which served as environment to their apparition lingers around the memory of them still with its unconscious or unheeding air;..."
"But sometimes it is just when everything seems to be lost that we experience a presentiment that may save us; one has knocked on all the doors which lead nowhere, and then, unwittingly, one pushes against the only one through which one may enter and for which one would have searched in vain for a hundred years, and it opens."
"... 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, the kind friend comes down again alone."
"The inertia of the mind urges it to slide down the easy slope of imagination, rather than to climb the steep slope of introspection."
"We have such numerous interests in our lives that it is not uncommon, on a single occasion, for the foundations of a happiness that does not yet exist to be laid down alongside the intensification of a grief from which we are still suffering."
"A man who, night after night, falls like a lump of lead upon his bed, and ceases to live until the moment when he wakes and rises, will such a man ever dream of making, I do not say great discoveries, but even minute observations upon sleep? He barely knows that he does sleep. A little insomnia is not without its value in making us appreciate sleep, in throwing a ray of light upon that darkness. A memory without fault is not a very powerful incentive to studying the phenomena of memory."
"He imagined himself lying there, unable to sleep, thinking of his mother, separated from her by the unresponsive blankets tucked too tightly round him, feeling the ceaseless thumping of his heart in the silence of the night, the irrevocability of absence, the rigid stillness of repose, the agony of solitude and sleeplessness. If the room was a prison, the bed was a tomb."
"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 every other feeling that, not being able to win, when he goes out, the admiration of his hall-porter, of the passers-by, of the cabman whom he hails, he prefers not to be seen by them at all, and with that object abandons every activity that would oblige him to go out of doors."
"I dined with Legrandin on the terrace of his house by moonlight. "There is a charming quality, is there not," he said to me, "in this silence; for hearts that are wounded, as mine is, a novelist whom you will read in time to come asserts that there is no remedy but silence and shadow. And you see this, my boy, there comes in all our lives a time, towards which you still have far to go, when the weary eyes can endure but one kind of light, the light which a fine evening like this prepares for us in the stillroom for darkness, when the ears can listen to no music save what the moonlight breathes through the flute of silence."
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