Great Throughts Treasury

"The only true voyage, the only bath in the Fountain of Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them sees, that each of them is; and this we do [with great artists]; with artists like these we do really fly from star to star."

"The painter Elstir [tried] to reproduce things not as he knew them to be but according to the optical illusions of which our first sight of them is composed."

"The opinions which we hold of one another, our relations with friends and kinfolk are in no sense permanent, save in appearance, but are as eternally fluid as the sea itself."

"The past not merely is not fugitive, it remains present."

"The person with whom we are in love is to be recognized only by the intensity of the pain that we suffer."

"The particulars of life do not matter to the artist; they merely provide him with the opportunity to lay bare his genius."

"The Prince?s name preserved, in the boldness with which its opening syllables were?to borrow an expression from music?attacked, and in the stammering repetition that scanned them, the energy, the mannered simplicity, the heavy refinements of the Teutonic race, projected like green boughs over the Heim of dark blue enamel which glowed with the mystic light of Rhenish window behind the pale and finely wrought gildings of the German eighteenth century. This name included, among the several names of which it was composed, that of a little German watering-place to which as a small child I had gone with my grandmother, under a mountain honoured by the feet of Goethe, from the vineyards of which we used to drink at the Kurhof the illustrious vintages with their compound and sonorous names like the epithets which Homer applies to his heroes. And so, scarcely had I heard it spoken than, before I had recalled the watering-place, the Prince?s name seemed to shrink, to become imbued with humanity, to find large enough for itself a little place in my memory to which it clung, familiar, earthbound, picturesque, appetizing, light, with something about it that was authorized, prescribed."

"The process which had begun in her [was] the great and general renunciation which old age makes in preparation for death, the chrysalis stage of life, which may be observed wherever life has been unduly prolonged."

"The real act of discovery consists not in finding new lands but in seeing with new eyes."

"The reality that I had known no longer existed. The places that we have known belong now only to the little world of space on which we map them for our own convenience. None of them was ever more than a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; remembrance of a particular form is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years."

"The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new lands but seeing with new eyes."

"The reason why a work of genius is not easily admired from the first is that the man who has created it is extraordinary, that few other men resemble him. It is his work itself that, by fertilizing the rare minds capable of understanding it, will make them increase and multiply."

"The remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were."

"The resurrection at our awakening-after that beneficent attack of mental alienation which is sleep-must after all be similar to what occurs when we recall a name, a line, a refrain that we had forgotten. And perhaps the resurrection of the soul after death is to be conceived as a phenomenon of memory."

"The rule among the human race ? a rule that naturally admits of exceptions ? is that the reputedly hard are the weak whom nobody wanted, and that the strong, caring little whether they are wanted or not, have alone that gentleness which the vulgar herd mistakes for weakness."

"The regularity of a habit is generally in proportion to its absurdity."

"The seaside life and the life of travel made me realize that the theatre of the world is stocked with fewer settings than actors, and with fewer actors than situations."

"The salient feature of the absurd age I was at--an age which for all its alleged awkwardness, is prodigiously rich-- is that reason is not its guide, and the most insignificant attributes of other people always appear to be consubstantial with their personality. One lives among monsters and gods, a stranger to peace of mind. There is scarcely a single one of our acts from that time which we would not prefer to abolish later on. But all we should lament is the loss of the spontaneity that urged them upon us. In later life, we see things with a more practical eye, one we share with the rest of society; but adolescence was the only time when we ever learned anything."

"The ''''sensitiveness'''' claimed by neurotic is matched by their egotism: they cannot abide the flaunting by others of the sufferings to which they pay an even increasing amount of attention in themselves"

"The stellar universe is not so difficult of comprehension as the real actions of other people."

"The soldier is convinced that a certain interval of time, capable of being indefinitely prolonged, will be allowed him before the bullet finds him, the thief before he is taken, men in general before they have to die."

"The suppression of suffering? Can I really have believed it, have believed that death merely strikes out what exists, and leaves everything else in its place, that it removes the pain from the heart of him for whom the other?s existence has ceased to be anything but a source of pain, that it removes the pain and puts nothing in its place? The suppression of pain!"

"The theatre of the world is stocked with fewer settings than actors, and with fewer actors than situations."

"The sleep which lay heavy upon the furniture, the room, the whole surroundings of which I formed but an insignificant pat and whose unconsciousness I should very soon return to share."

"The thirst for something other than what we have ... to bring something new, even if it is worse, some emotion, some sorrow; when our sensibility, which happiness has silenced like an idle harp, wants to resonate under some hand, even a rough one, and even if it might be broken by it."

"The tiny, initial clue... by allowing us to imagine what we do not know stimulates a desire for knowledge."

"The true paradises are the lost paradises."

"The time which we have at our disposal every day is elastic; the passions that we feel expand it, those that we inspire contract it; and habit fills up what remains. Since railways came into existence, the necessity of not missing the train has taught us to take account of minutes whereas among the ancient Romans, who not only had a more cursory science of astronomy but led less hurried lives, the notion not of minutes but even of fixed hours barely existed."

"The true voyage of discovery consists not of seeking new landscapes, but having new eyes."

"The true paradises are the paradises that we have lost."

"The truth I am seeking is not in the drink, but in me."

"The truth has no need to be uttered to be made apparent...one may perhaps gather it with more certainty, without waiting for words, without even bothering one's head about them, from a thousand outward signs, even from certain invisible phenomena, analogous in the sphere of human character to what in nature are atmospheric changes. I might perhaps have suspected this, since to myself at that time it frequently occurred that I said things in which there was no vestige of truth, while I made the real truth plain by all manner of involuntary confidences expressed by my body and in my actions (which were at once interpreted by Fran‡oise)."

"The variations of the Duchess's judgment spared no one, except her husband. He alone had never been in love with her, in him she had always felt an iron character, indifferent to the caprices that she displayed, contemptuous of her beauty, violent, of a will that would never bend, the sort under which alone nervous people can find tranquility."

"The truth, even more, is that life is perpetually weaving fresh threads which link one individual and one event to another, and that these threads are crossed and re-crossed, doubled and redoubled to thicken the web, so that between any slightest point of our past and all the others a rich network of memories gives us an almost infinite variety of communicating paths to choose from."

"The warm glazes, the sparkling penumbra of the room itself and, through the little window framed with honeysuckle, in the rustic avenue, the resilient dryness of the sun-parched earth, veiled only by the diaphanous gauze woven of distance and the shade of the trees."

"The whole sky was formed of that radiant and almost pale blue which the wayfarer lying down in a field sees at times above his head, but so consistent, so intense, that he feels that the blue of which it is composed has been utilized without any alloy and with such an inexhaustible richness that one might delve more and more deeply into its substance without encountering an atom of anything but that same blue."

"The truth is that every morning war is declared afresh. And the men who wish to continue it are as guilty as the men who began it, more guilty perhaps, for the latter perhaps did not foresee all its horrors."

"The wish for a total mutual absorption between the beloved mother and himself reveals itself as a leading motif in symbiotic love with its clearly oral implications. No closeness to the love object is ever satisfying to Proust unless it is unlimited in time and space. This is apparent in the basic scene [with his mother] and becomes even clearer in all the derivatives of other possessive, all-encompassing love situations, whether they are focused on an Albertine or an Albert."

"The woman whose face we have before our eyes more constantly than light itself...this unique woman--we know quite well that it would have been another woman that would now be unique to us if we had been in another town than that in which we made her acquaintance, if we had explored other quarters of the town, if we had frequented the house of a different hostess. Unique, we suppose; she is innumerable. And yet she is compact, indestructible in our loving eyes, irreplaceable for a long time to come by any other."

"The work of art is our only means of recapturing the past... I understood that all these materials for literary work were nothing else than my past life and that they had come to me in the midst of frivolous pleasures, in idleness, through tender affection and through sorrow, and that I had stored them up without foreseeing their final purpose or even their survival, any more than does the seed when it lays by all the sustenance that is going to nourish the seedling."

"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."

"Their love--and consequently their fear--of the crowd being one of the most powerful motives in all men, whether they seek to please other people or to astonish them, or to show them that they despise them."

"Theoretically, we know that the world turns, but in fact we do not notice it, the earth on which we walk does not seem to move and we live on in peace. This is how it is concerning Time in our lives. And to render its passing perceptible, novelists must... have their readers cross ten, twenty, thirty years in two minutes."

"Then from those profound slumbers we awake in a dawn, not knowing who we are, being nobody, newly born, ready for anything, the brain emptied of that past which was life until then. And perhaps it is more wonderful still when our landing at the waking-point is abrupt and the thoughts of our sleep, hidden by a cloak of oblivion, have no time to return to us gradually, before sleep ceases. Then, from the black storm through which we seem to have passed (but we do not even say we), we emerge prostrate, without a thought, awe that is void of content."

"There are certain original and distinguished authors in whom the least 'freedom of speech' is thought revolting because they have not begun by flattering the public taste, and serving up to it the commonplace expressions to which it is used; it was by the same process that Swann infuriated M. Verdurin. In his case as in theirs it was the novelty of his language which led his audience to suspect the blackness of his designs."

"Then it would begin to seem unintelligible, as the thoughts of a former existence must be to a reincarnate spirit; the subject of my book would separate itself from me, leaving me free to choose whether I would form part of it or no; and at the same time my sight would return and I would be astonished to find myself in a state of darkness, pleasant and restful enough for the eyes, and even more, perhaps, for my mind, to which it appeared incomprehensible, without a cause, a matter dark indeed."

"There are people whose faces assume an unaccustomed beauty and majesty the moment they cease to look out of their eyes."

"There are mountainous, arduous days, up which one takes an infinite time to climb, and downward-sloping days which one can descend at full tilt, singing as one goes."

"There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we believe we left without having lived them, those we spent with a favorite book."

"There are things in our souls which we know not how much they mean to us. Or rather, if we live without them, it is because, either through fear of failing or suffering, we daily postpone the moment of coming under their thrall."