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"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 in which one can discern no commiseration, no tenderness at the sight of suffering humanity, and no fear of hurting it, the face devoid of gentleness or sympathy, the sublime face of true goodness."
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"... I have always thought of Christmas-time... as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys."

"Charity degrades those who receive it and hardens those who dispense it."

"The more you give, the less you need."

"Charity is injurious unless it helps the recipient to become independent of it."

"The system of volunteerism is divisive. It pits one charity against the others for the charity dollar."

"The answer to the prayer of a rich man is in the hands of the poor."
Explore more quotes by Marcel Proust

"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 as when they were alive. Itis as though they were traveling abroad."

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

"A fashionable milieu is one in which everybody's opinion is made up of the opinion of all the others. Has everybody a different opinion? Then it is a literary milieu."

"It is not because other people are dead that our affection for them grows faint, it is because we ourselves are dying."

"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 we had put into the same words when we uttered them, is a fact which is perpetually demonstrated in daily life."

"... 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."

"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 about, or a one-day fling one wants to conceal from one's wife - than a good reputation is in utterly overshadowing disreputable habits."

"... the burrowing wasp, which in order to provide a supply of fresh meat for her offspring after her own decease, calls in the science of anatomy to amplify the resources of her instinctive cruelty, and, having made a collection of weevils and spiders, proceeds with marvellous knowledge and skill to pierce the nerve-centre on which their power of locomotion (but none of their other vital functions) depends, so that the paralysed insect, beside which her egg is laid, will furnish the larva, when it is hatched, with a tamed and inoffensive quarry, incapable either of flight or of resistance, but perfectly fresh for the larder..."

"... they imagine that the life they are obliged to lead is not that for which they are really fitted, and they bring to their regular occupations either a fantastic indifference or a sustained and lofty application, scornful, bitter, and conscientious."

"My dears, laugh at me if you like; it is not conventionally beautiful, but there is something in its quaint old face which pleases me. If it could play the piano, I am sure it would really play."
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