Great Throughts Treasury

"My dear Madame, I just noticed that I forgot my cane at your house yesterday; please be good enough to give it to the bearer of this letter. P.S. Kindly pardon me for disturbing you; I just found my cane."

"My dear, she had said to Mamma, I could not allow myself to give the child anything that was not well written."

"My grandmother considered light reading as unwholesome as sweets and cakes. [She said] 'I could not allow myself to give the child anything that was not well written.'"

"My house contains every useless thing in the world. it lacks only the one essential, a piece of sky like this one."

"My grandmother was so humble of heart and so gentle that her tenderness for others and her disregard for herself and her own troubles blended in a smile which, unlike those seen on the majority of human faces, bore no trace of irony save for herself, while for all of us kisses seemed to spring from her eyes, which could not look upon those she loved without seeming to bestow upon them passionate caresses."

"Nine tenths of the ills from which intelligent people suffer spring from their intellect. They need at least a doctor who understands the disease. How can you expect Cottard to be able to treat you? He has made allowances for the difficulty of digesting sauces, for gastric trouble, but he has made no allowance for the effect of reading Shakespeare."

"No days, perhaps, of all our childhood are ever so fully lived are those that we had regarded as not being lived at all: days spent wholly with a favorite book."

"No doubt, albeit each one of us speaks mendaciously of the pleasure...of being loved, it is a general law...that the person whom we do not love and who does love us seems to us quite intolerable. To such a person, to a woman of whom we say not that she loves us but that she bores us, we prefer the society of any other, who has neither her charm, nor her looks, nor her brains. She will recover these, in our estimation, only when she has ceased to love us."

"Neurosis has an absolute genius for malingering. There is no illness which it cannot counterfeit perfectly. If it is capable of deceiving the doctor, how should it fail to deceive the patient?"

"No exile at the South Pole or on the summit of Mont Blanc separates us more effectively from others than the practice of a hidden vice."

"Not caring for their lives' is it?"

"Nobility is often no more than the inner aspect which our egotistical feelings assume when we have not yet named and classified them."

"Now I could appreciate the merits of a broad, poetical, powerful interpretation, or rather it was to this that those epithets were conventionally applied, but only as we give the names of Mars, Venus, Saturn to planets which have nothing mythological about them. We feel in one world, we think, we give names to things in another; between the two we can establish a certain correspondence, but not bridge the gap."

"Now are the woods all black, But still the sky is blue."

"Now there is one thing I can tell you: you will enjoy certain pleasures you would not fathom now. When you still had your mother you often thought of the days when you would have her no longer. Now you will often think of days past when you had her. When you are used to this horrible thing that they will forever be cast into the past, then you will gently feel her revive, returning to take her place, her entire place, beside you. At the present time, this is not yet possible. Let yourself be inert, wait till the incomprehensible power ... that has broken you restores you a little, I say a little, for henceforth you will always keep something broken about you. Tell yourself this, too, for it is a kind of pleasure to know that you will never love less, that you will never be consoled, that you will constantly remember more and more."

"Now the same mystery which often veils from our eyes the reason for a catastrophe envelops just as frequently, when love is in question, the suddenness of certain happy solutions, such as had been brought to me by Gilberte's letter. Happy, or at least seemingly happy, for there are few that can really be happy when we are dealing with a sentiment of such a kind that any satisfaction we can give it does no more, as a rule, than dislodge some pain. And yet sometimes a respite is granted us, and we have for a little while the illusion of being healed."

"Often it is just lack of imagination that keeps a man from suffering very much. ."

"Of all the flying seeds in the world, that to which are attached the most solid wings, enabling it to be disseminated at the greatest distance from its point of origin, is still a joke."

"On no days of our childhood did we live so fully perhaps as those we thought we had left behind without living them, those that we spent with a favorite book."

"Once we have reached a certain degree of enfeeblement, whether caused by age or by ill health, all pleasure taken at the expense of sleep, every disturbance of routine, becomes a nuisance."

"One becomes moral as soon as one is unhappy."

"Often one listens and hears nothing, if it is a piece of music at all complicated to which one is listening for the first time. And yet when, later on, this sonata had been played over to me two or three times I found that I knew it quite well... If one had indeed, as one supposes, received no impression from the first hearing, the second, the third would be equally 'first hearings' and there would be no reason why one should understand it any better after the tenth."

"One cannot change, that is to say become a different person, while continuing to acquiesce to the feelings of the person one has ceased to be."

"One can feel an attraction towards a particular person. But to release that fount of sorrow, that sense of the irreparable, those agonies which prepare the way for love, there must be -- and this is perhaps, more than a person, the actual object which our passion seeks so anxiously to embrace -- the risk of an impossibility."

"One morning indeed, I felt a sudden misgiving that she not only had left the house but had gone for good: I had just heard the sound of a door which seemed to me to be that of her room. On tiptoe I crept towards the room, opened the door, stood upon the threshold. In the dim light the bedclothes bulged in a semi-circle that must be Albertine who, with her body bent, was sleeping with her feet and face to the wall. Only, overflowing the bed, the hair upon that head, abundant and dark, made me realize that it was she, that she had not opened her door, had not stirred, and I felt that this motionless and living semi-circle, in which a whole human life was contained and which was the only thing to which I attached any value, I felt that it was there, in my despotic possession."

"One never finds quite as high as one has been expecting a cathedral, a wave in a storm, a dancer's leap in the air."

"One pretended not to know that the body of a hostess was at the disposal of all comers, provided that her visiting list showed no gaps."

"Only that which is absent can be imagined."

"One says the things which one feels the need to say, and which the other will not understand: one speaks for oneself alone."

"Only through art can we emerge from ourselves and know what another person sees."

"Only through art can we get outside of ourselves and know another's view of the universe."

"Parties of this sort are as a rule premature. They have little reality until the following day, when they occupy the attention of the people who were not invited."

"Or she would look at him with a sullen expression, once again he would see before him a face worthy of figuring in Botticelli's Life of Moses, he would place her in it, he would give her neck the necessary inclination; and when he had well and truly painted her in distemper, in the fifteenth century, on the wall of the Sistine Chapel, the idea that she had nevertheless remained here, by the piano, in the present moment, ready to be kissed and possessed, the idea of her materiality and her life would intoxicate him with such force that, his eyes distracted, his jaw tensed as though to devour her, he would swoop down upon that Botticelli virgin and begin pinching her cheeks."

"Our memory is like a shop in the window of which is exposed now one, now another photograph of the same person. And as a rule the most recent exhibit remains for some time the only one to be seen."

"Our gravest apprehensions, as well as our fondest hopes, are not beyond our strength and we are able in the end to overcome the former and realize the latter."

"Our shadows, now parallel, now close together and joined, traced an exquisite pattern at our feet."

"Our love of life is only an old liaison of which we do not know how to rid ourselves. Its strength lies in its permanence. But death which severs it will cure us of the desire for immortality."

"Our virtues themselves are not free and floating qualities over which we retain a permanent control and power of disposal; they come to be so closely linked in our minds with the actions in conjunction with which we have made it our duty to exercise them that if we come to engage in an activity of a different kind, it catches us off guard and without the slightest awareness that it might involve the application of those same virtues."

"Our slightest desire, though unique as a chord, nevertheless includes the fundamental notes on which the whole of our life is built. And sometimes, if we were to eliminate one of them, even one that we do not hear, that we are not aware of, one that has no connection with the object of our quest, we would nevertheless see our whole desire for that object disappear."

"Our words are, as a general rule, filled by the people to whom we address them with a meaning which those people derive from their own substance, a meaning widely different from that which we had put into the same words when we uttered them."

"Our worst fears, like our greatest hopes, are not outside our powers, and we can come in the end to triumph over the former and to achieve the latter."

"People can have many different kinds of pleasure. The real one is that for which they will forsake the others."

"People often say that, by pointing out to a man the faults of his mistress, you succeed only in strengthening his attachment to her, because he does not believe you."

"People do not die for us immediately, but remain bathed in a sort of aura of life which bears no relation to true immortality but through which they continue to occupy our thoughts in the same way as when they were alive. It is as though they were traveling abroad."

"People of taste and refinement tell us nowadays that Renoir is one of the great painters of the last century. But in so saying they forget the element of Time, and that it took a great deal of time, well into the present century, before Renoir was hailed as a great artist. To succeed thus in gaining recognition, the original painter, the original writer proceeds on the lines adopted by oculists. The course of treatment they give us by their painting or by their prose is not always agreeable to us. When it is at an end the operator says to us: 'Now look!' And, lo and behold, the world around us (which was not created once and for all, but is created afresh as often as an original artist is born) appears to us entirely different from the old world, but perfectly clear."

"People claim that we recapture for a moment the self that we were long ago when we enter some house or garden in which we used to live in our youth. But these are most hazardous pilgrimages, which end as often in disappointment as in success. It is in ourselves that we should rather seek to find those fixed places, contemporaneous with different years."

"People have many different kinds of pleasure. The real one is that for which they will forsake the others."

"People don't know when they are happy. They're never so unhappy as they think they are."

"People who are not in love fail to understand how an intelligent man can suffer because of a very ordinary woman. This is like being surprised that anyone should be stricken with cholera because of a creature so insignificant as the comma bacillus."

"People of the world are so imbued with their own stupidity that they can never believe that one of their own has talent. They appreciate only people of letters who are not of their world."