“I think where people tend to end up results from a combination of encouragement, accident, and lucky break… So it's all about trying to find the best fit between your talents and what the world can offer at that point in time.”

Comments: Click to comment

“Feeling lost, crazy and desperate belongs to a good life as much as optimism, certainty and reason.”

Comments: Click to comment

“There are few things humans are more dedicated to than unhappiness… the frailty of our bodies, the fickleness of love, the insincerities of social life, the compromises of friendship, the deadening effects of habit… we might naturally expect that no event would be awaited with greater anticipation than the moment of our own extinction.”

from How Proust Can Change Your Life

Comments: Click to comment

“Perhaps it is true that we do not really exist until there is someone there to see us existing, we cannot properly speak until there is someone who can understand what we are saying in essence, we are not wholly alive until we are loved.”

Comments: Click to comment

“Every fall into love involves the triumph of hope over self-knowledge. We fall in love hoping we won't find in another what we know is in ourselves, all the cowardice, weakness, laziness, dishonesty, compromise, and stupidity… We fall in love because we long to escape from ourselves with someone as beautiful, intelligent, and witty as we are ugly, stupid, and dull. We can only be somewhat shocked-how can they be as wonderful as we had hoped when they have the bad taste to approve of someone like us?”

from On Love

Comments: Click to comment

“Perhaps the easiest people to fall in love with are those about whom we know nothing. Romances are never as pure as those we imagine during long train journeys, as we secretly contemplate a beautiful person who is gazing out of the window – a perfect love story interrupted only when the beloved looks back into the carriage and starts up a dull conversation”

from On Love

Comments: Click to comment

“Everyone returns us to a different sense of ourselves, for we become a little of who they think we are.”

from On Love

Comments: Click to comment

“Every fall into love involves the triumph of hope over self-knowledge. We fall in love hoping we won't find in another what we know is in ourselves, all the cowardice, weakness, laziness, dishonesty, compromise, and stupidity… We fall in love because we long to escape from ourselves with someone as beautiful, intelligent, and witty as we are ugly, stupid, and dull. We can only be somewhat shocked-how can they be as wonderful as we had hoped when they have the bad taste to approve of someone like us?”

from On Love

Comments: Click to comment

“The most attractive are not those who allow us to kiss them at once [we soon feel ungrateful] or those who never allow us to kiss them [we soon forget them], but those who coyly lead us between the two extremes.”

from On Love

Comments: Click to comment

“I think where people tend to end up results from a combination of encouragement, accident, and lucky break… So it's all about trying to find the best fit between your talents and what the world can offer at that point in time.”

Comments: Click to comment

“I'm also interested in the modern suggestion that you can have a combination of love and sex in a marriage — which no previous society has ever believed.”

Comments: Click to comment

“We may seek a fortune for no greater reason than to secure the respect and attention of people who would otherwise look straight through us.”

Comments: Click to comment

“By understanding and analyzing our feelings, we learn to see how emotions impact on our behavior in unexpected, counterintuitive and sometimes dangerous ways. Philosophers were the first therapists.”

Comments: Click to comment

“It’s a huge psychological achievement to accept other humans in their bewildering mixture of good and bad… no one we love will ever satisfy us completely—but that this is never a reason to hate them either. We should move away from the naivety and cruelty of splitting people into the camps of the awful and the wondrous, to the mature wisdom of integrating them into the large collective of the ‘good enough’.”

Comments: Click to comment

“The most boring and unproductive question one can ask of any religion is whether or not it is true.”

from Religion for Atheists

Comments: Click to comment

“Art has replaced religion as a touchstone of our reverence and devotion.”

from Religion for Atheists

Comments: Click to comment

“It's as important to know how to give up on dreams and ambitions as it is to know how to generate them.”

from Twitter

Comments: Click to comment

“... a central theme of the novel: a search for the causes behind the dissipation and loss of time. Far from a memoir tracing the passage of a more lyrical age, it was a practical, universally applicable story about how to stop wasting, and begin appreciating one's life... a hope that we might learn to adjust our priorities before it's time to have a last game of golf and keel over.”

from How Proust Can Change Your Life, 1997

Comments: Click to comment

“a man who had spent the last 14 years lying in a narrow bed under a pile of thinly woven woolen blankets writing an unusually long novel without an adequate bedside lamp…. his friends were almost unanimous in suggesting that Proust had been a paragon of companionship, an embodiment of friendship’s every virtue.”

from How Proust Can Change Your Life, 1997

Comments: Click to comment

“In a functioning democracy, the chief job of a politician is to be a teacher.”

from Twitter

Comments: Click to comment

“our best chance of contentment lies in taking up the wisdom offered to us in coded form through our coughs, allergies, social gaffes, and emotional betrayals, and to avoid the ingratitude of those who blame”

from How Proust Can Change Your Life

Comments: Click to comment

“Only when plunged into grief do we have the Proustian incentive to confront difficult truths, as we wail under the bedclothes, like branches in the autumn wind.”

from How Proust Can Change Your Life

Comments: Click to comment

“What is fascinating about marriage is why anyone wants to get married.”

Comments: Click to comment

“However brilliant, however wise the work, it seems that the lives of artists can be relied upon to exhibit an extraordinary, incongruous range of turmoil, misery, and stupidity.”

from How Proust Can Change Your Life

Comments: Click to comment

“We don't really learn anything properly until there is a problem, until we are in pain, until something fails to go as we had hoped.”

from How Proust Can Change Your Life

Comments: Click to comment

“However, only too frequently, suffering fails to alchemize into ideas, and instead of affording us a better sense of reality pushes us into a baneful direction... by engaging a variety of defense mechanisms which entail arrogance and delusion, cruelty and callousness, spite and rage.”

from How Proust Can Change Your Life

Comments: Click to comment

“Our notion of reality is at variance with actual reality because we are surrounded by clichéd depictions of the world”

from How Proust Can Change Your Life

Comments: Click to comment

“because the presence of others calls for continuous responses, we are left to regret the insanity of what we say, and the missed opportunity of what we do not. By contrast, a book provides for a distillation of our sporadic mind, a record of its most vital manifestations, a concentration of inspired moments”

from How Proust Can Change Your Life

Comments: Click to comment

“the level of insincerity apparently required in every friendship... a project to secure affection, and a project to express ourselves honestly... the pursuit of affection and the pursuit of truth are fundamentally rather than occasionally incompatible”

from How Proust Can Change Your Life

Comments: Click to comment

“We suffer, therefore we think, and we do so because thinking helps us to place pain in context, it helps us to understand its origins, plot its dimensions and reconcile ourselves to its presence.”

from How Proust Can Change Your Life

Comments: Click to comment

“The happiness which may emerge from taking a second look... reveals the extent to which our dissatisfactions may be the result of failing to look properly at our lives rather tan the result of anything inherently deficient about them... a certain way of looking, as opposed to a mere process of acquiring or possessing.”

from How Proust Can Change Your Life

Comments: Click to comment

“the finest thing about betrayal and jealousy—it's ability to generate the intellectual motivation necessary to investigate the hidden sides of others.”

from How Proust Can Change Your Life

Comments: Click to comment

“everything is potentially a fertile subject for art and we can make discoveries as valuable in an advertisement for soap as in Pascal's Pensées... the greatness of works of art has nothing to do with the apparent quality of their subject matter, and everything to do with the subsequent treatment of that matter.”

from How Proust Can Change Your Life

Comments: Click to comment

“Pascal was born in 1623, and was recognized from an early age to be a genius. By 12 he had worked out the first 32 propositions of Euclid; he went on to invent the mathematics of probability, he measured atmospheric pressure, constructed a calculating machine, designed an omnibus, got tuberculosis and wrote the brilliant and pessimistic series of aphorisms in defense of Christian belief know as the Pensées.”

from How Proust Can Change Your Life

Comments: Click to comment

“beauty is something to be found rather than passively encountered, it requires us to pick up on certain details, to identify the whiteness of a cotton dress, the reflection of the sea... Chardin opens our eyes to the beauty of salt cellars, Elstir paints nothing grander than cotton dresses and harbors”

from How Proust Can Change Your Life

Comments: Click to comment

“Don't despair: despair suggests you are in total control and know what is coming. You don't—surrender to events with hope.”

Comments: Click to comment