Tao Te Ching
In Search of Lost Time
By Marcel Proust
Trans: Jonathan D. Spence
Themes
Quotes from In Search of Lost Time
“A book is the product of another self to the one we display in our habits, in society, in our vices.”
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“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.”
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“a makeshift lie is quickly forgotten... They pain us coming from a person whom we love, and thereby enable us to penetrate a little deeper in our knowledge of human nature instead of being content to play around on its surface”
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“Always try to keep a patch of sky above your life.”
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73. Heaven’s Net
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“Amorous curiosity is like the curiosity aroused in us by the names of places; perpetually disappointed, it revives and remains for ever insatiable.”
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“An hour is not just an hour, it is a vase full of perfume, sounds, projects, and moods.”
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“Because they imply the sacrifice of a more or less flattering situation to purely intimate joys, shockingly irregular marriages are usually the most estimable.”
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“Each generation of critics does nothing but take the opposite of the truths accepted by their predecessors.”
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“Everything that seems to us imperishable tends toward its destruction.”
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“Friendship is in the end no more than a lie which seeks to make us believe that we are not irremediably alone”
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“Friendship is in the end no more than a lie which seeks to make us believe that we are not irremediably alone”
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“Genius consists in the power to reflect and not in the intrinsic value of the thing reflected, from the faculty of transforming or transposing. Those who produce works of genius are those who—ceasing to live for themselves—have the ability to make a mirror of their personality.”
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“Habit is a second nature which prevents us from knowing the first, of which it has neither the cruelties nor the enchantments.”
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“Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.”
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18. The Sick Society
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“I adore certain symbols as much as you do. But it would be absurd to sacrifice to the symbol the reality which it symbolizes.”
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“Infirmity alone makes us take notice and learn, and enables us to analyze processes which we would otherwise know nothing about.”
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“It is a lie that truth always belongs to the majority! When a truth is hoary with years it is a long way to becoming a lie.”
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1. The Unnamed
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“It is always during a passing state of mind that we make lasting resolutions.”
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“Jealousy is often but a restless desire for tyranny applying itself to love.”
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“Let us leave pretty women to men with no imagination.”
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12. This Over That
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“Love is a striking example of how little reality means to us.”
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“Love—and consequently fear—of the crowd is among the most powerful motives in all men: an inordinate love of the crowd which so completely dominates every other feeling that—unable to obtain the admiration of the janitor, of the passers-by, and of the loitering taxi driver—a man prefers never to be seen”
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“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 n a few years' time.”
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“My destination is no longer a place, rather a new way of seeing.”
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40. Returning
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“Only through art can we emerge from ourselves and know what another person sees... Thanks to art, instead of seeing a single world—our own—we see it multiply until we have before us as many worlds as there are original artists.”
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“Pleasures are like photographs. In their presence, we only see the negative which we develop later at home in our inner darkroom, whose door is always closed to us as long as we are around others.”
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“Reading is on the threshold of the spiritual life—only an incitement—it can introduce us to it: it does not constitute it”
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“Reason opens our eyes; an error that we have dispelled gives us an additional sense.”
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“Sometimes in the afternoon sky a white moon would creep up like a little cloud, furtive, without display, suggesting an actress who does not have to 'come on' for awhile, and so goes 'in front' in her ordinary clothes to watch the rest of the company but keeps in the background, not wishing to attract attention to herself.”
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“The delightful mirage that love projects entices men into 'mistakes' like marrying their cook or their best friend's mistress. These often become the only poetic act they accomplish in their entire lives.”
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“The mind can be influenced like a plant, like a cell, like a chemical element; one has only to introduce it into a series of new circumstances or a new setting.”
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“The only way to attack language is to attack it... there are no certainties, even grammatical ones... Every writer is obliged to create his own language, as every violinist is obliged to create his own 'tone'... they begin to write well only on condition that they're original, that they create their own language... only that which bears the imprint of our choice, our taste, our uncertainty, our desire and our weakness can be beautiful.”
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“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”
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“The thought that another person partakes of a mysterious life which his or her love would open up to us is all we ned to make us fall in love.”
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“The time at our disposal each day is elastic; the passions we feel dilate it, those that inspire us shrink it, and habit fills it.”
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“There is no such thing as a beautiful prison.”
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“There is nothing like desire for preventing the things one says from having any resemblance to the things in one's mind.”
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“Time, which changes people, does not alter the image we have retained of them.”
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“Time, which changes people, does not alter the image we have retained of them.”
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“To believe in medicine would be the height of folly, if not to believe in it were not a greater folly still.”
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“True beauty is indeed the one thing incapable of answering the expectations of an over-romantic imagination... What disappointments has it not caused since it first appeared to the mass of mankind!”
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“Voluntary memory—the memory of the intellect and the eyes—[gives] us only imprecise facsimiles of the past which no more resemble it than pictures of bad painters resemble the spring... So we don't believe that life is beautiful because we don't recall it”
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“We cannot be taught wisdom, we have to discover it for ourselves by a journey which no one can undertake fir us, an effort which no one can spare us.”
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“We do not regret having become a different person after the passing of years because the personality that has been eclipsed is no longer present to deplore the other personality”
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“We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.”
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“We really only know what is new, what suddenly, by a change in tone, strikes us with a new sensation, what habit has not yet supplanted by its pale facsimiles.”
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“What we call our love or our jealousy is not a single continuous passion. It is composed of an infinite number of successive loves, of different ephemeral jealousies, which, following each other without interruption, give the impression of continuity, the illusion of unity.”
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“What we call reality is a certain rapport between our sensations and the memories that encircle us at the same moment.”
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“When we discover the true lives of other people, the real world beneath the world of appearance, we get as many surprises as on visiting a house of plain exterior which inside is full of hidden treasures, torture-chambers, or skeletons”
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Quotes about In Search of Lost Time (3 quotes)
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“... 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.”
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