We must never be afraid to go too far, for truth lies beyond.

One becomes moral as soon as one is unhappy.

Hard people are weak people whom nobody wants, and the strong, caring little whether they are wanted or not, have alone that meekness which the common herd mistake for weakness.

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

There are few who are worthy to understand what I feel. I seek out those who are of this chosen few, and I avoid the rest.

Desire makes everything blossom; possession makes everything wither and fade.

Like many intellectuals, he was incapable of saying a simple thing in a simple way.

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

It is always thus, impelled by a state of mind which is destined not to last, we make our irrevocable decisions.

Illness is the doctor to whom we pay most heed; to kindness, to knowledge, we make promise only; pain we obey.

The laborious process of causation which sooner or later will bring about every possible effect, including, consequently, those which one believed to be least possible, naturally slow at times, is rendered slower still by our desire.

The being that I shall be after death has no more reason to remember the man I have been since my birth than the latter to remember what I was before it.

We remember the truth because it has a name, is rooted in the past, but a makeshift lie is quickly forgotten.

Let us leave pretty women to men with no imagination.

I felt that I did not really remember her except through the pain, and I longed for the nails that riveted her to my consciousness to be driven yet deeper.

Everything that seems imperishable tends to extinguishment.

It is our noticing them that puts things in a room, our growing used to them that takes them away again and clears a space for us.

Man is the creature who cannot escape from himself, who knows other people only in himself, and when he asserts the contrary, he is lying.

Memory as it grows fainter loosens them, and notwithstanding the illusion by which we want to be duped and which, out of love, friendship, politeness, deference, duty, we dupe other people, we exist alone.

The bonds between ourselves and another person exists only in our minds.

Everything great in the world is done by neurotics; they alone founded our religions and created our masterpieces.

Time, which changes people, does not alter the image we have of them.

There is no more ridiculous custom than the one that makes you express sympathy once and for all on a given day to a person whose sorrow will endure as long as his life.

Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.

We exist only by virtue of what we possess, we possess only what is really present to us, and many of our memories, our moods, our ideas sail away on a voyage of their own until they are lost to sight!

Lovers would find it as hard to count the kisses exchanged in an hour as to count the flowers in a meadow in May.

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

M. de Charlus made no reply and looked as if he had not heard, which was one of his favorite forms of rudeness.

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

In reality, every reader is, while reading, the reader of his own self.

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.

To be an artist is to fail, as no other dare to fail… failure is his world and the shrink from it desertion.

No sooner does an approaching hour become the present for us than it sheds all its charms.

Sunrise is a necessary concomitant of long railway journeys, like hard-boiled eggs, illustrated papers, packs of cards, rivers upon which boats strain but make no progress.

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.

We may talk for a lifetime without doing more than indefinitely repeat the vacuity of a minute.

The reader’s recognition in himself of what the book says is the proof of the book’s truth.

Happiness is good for the body, but it is grief which develops the strengths of the mind.

With intelligent people, three-quarters of the things they suffer from come from their intelligence.

If we are to make reality endurable, we must all nourish a fantasy or two.

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.

What barrier is so insurmountable as silence?

Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.

We think and name in one world, we live and feel in another.

Reality is never more than a first step towards an unknown on the road to which one can never progress very far.

To such beings, such fugitive beings, their own nature and our anxiety fasten wings. And even when they are with us the look in their eyes seems to warn us that they are about to take flight.

Because happiness alone is good for the body; whereas sorrow develops the strength of the mind.

The true paradises are the paradises that we have lost.

Love is a striking example of how little reality means to us.

In a separation it is the one who is not really in love who says the more tender things.

For, just as in the beginning it is formed by desire, so afterwards love is kept in existence only by painful anxiety.

Among all the modes by which love is brought into being, among all the agents which disseminate that blessed bane, there are few so efficacious as this gust of feverish agitation that sweeps over us from time to time.

Love, ever unsatisfied, lives always in the moment that is about to come.

A woman whom we love seldom satisfies all our needs, and we deceive her with a woman we do not love.

This malady which Swann’s love had become had so proliferated, was so closely interwoven with all his habits, with all his actions, with his thoughts, his health, his sleep, his life, even with what he hoped for after his death, was so utterly inseparable from him.

Ah, in those earliest days of love how naturally the kisses spring into life!

With women who do not love us, as with the “dear departed,” the knowledge that there is no hope left does not prevent us from continuing to wait.

For the possession of what we love is an even greater joy than love itself.

In most women’s lives, everything, even the greatest sorrow, comes down to a question of ‘I haven’t got a thing to wear’.

For, medicine being a compendium of the successive and contradictory mistakes of medical practitioners, when we summon the wisest of them to our aid, the chances are that we may be relying on a scientific truth the error of which will be recognized in a few years’ time.

But should a sensation from the distant past-like those musical instruments that record and preserve the sound and style of the various artists who played them-enable our memory to make us hear that name with the particular tone it then had for our ears.

The world will never realize how much it owes to neurotics and what they have suffered in order to bestow their gifts on it.

Everything we think of as great has come to us from neurotics. It is they and they alone who found religions and create great works of art.

Always try to keep a patch of sky above your life.

Sadists of Mlle Vinteuil’s sort are creatures so purely sentimental, so naturally virtuous, that even sensual pleasure appears to them as something bad, the prerogative of the wicked.

The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) which we do not suspect.

And so it is with our own past. It is a labor in vain to recapture it: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile.

In my cowardice I became at once a man, and did what all we grown men do when face to face with suffering and injustice; I preferred not to see them.

Knowledge of the thing cannot impede it.

Even the simple act which we describe as ‘seeing someone we know’ is, to some extent, an intellectual process.

And then, gradually, the memory of her would fade away, I had forgotten the girl of my dream.

For what we suppose to be our love or our jealousy is never a single, continuous and indivisible passion.

Even from the simplest, the most realistic point of view, the countries which we long for occupy, at any given moment, a far larger place in our actual life than the country in which we happen to be.

Whenever she saw in others an advantage, however trivial, which she herself lacked, she would persuade herself that it was no advantage at all, but a drawback, and would pity so as not to have to envy them.

We shall perish, but we have as hostages these divine captives who will follow and share our fate. And death in their company is somehow less bitter, less inglorious, perhaps even less probable.

Perhaps it is not-being that is the true state, and all our dream of life is inexistent.

How often is not the prospect of future happiness thus sacrificed to one’s impatient insistence upon an immediate gratification.

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.

We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full.

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

For a long time I used to go to bed early.

We are at times too ready to believe that the present is the only possible state of things.

If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less, but to dream more, to dream all the time.

Perhaps the immobility of the things that surround us is forced upon them by our conviction that they are themselves, and not anything else, and by the immobility of our conceptions of them.

Nine tenths of the ills from which intelligent people suffer spring from their intellect.

An artist has no need to express his mind directly in his work for it to express the quality of that mind.

People wish to learn to swim and at the same time to keep one foot on the ground.

I thought nothing at all, but I felt an immense sadness, as when two parts of one’s past existence, which have been anchored near to one.

We ought not to attach ourselves to beings, it is not beings who exist in reality and are amenable to description, but ideas.

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.

They sacrifice all the rest, devote all their efforts, make everything else subservient to the pursuit of some phantom.

Inviolable solitude.

They reminded me that it was my fate to pursue only phantoms, creatures whose reality existed to a great extent in my imagination.

For there is in this world in which everything wears out, everything perishes, one thing that crumbles into dust, that destroys itself still more completely, leaving behind still fewer traces of itself than Beauty: namely Grief.

The practice of solitude had given him a love for it, as happens with every big thing which we have begun by fearing.

When a creature is so badly constituted (perhaps in nature that being is man) that he cannot love unless he suffers and that he must suffer to learn truth, the life of such a being becomes in the end very exhausting.

I felt myself still reliving a past which was no longer anything more than the history of another person.