“The individual is steeped in something more general than himself.” #MarcelProust #WithinABuddingGrove

“Artistic genius acts in a similar way to those extremely high temperatures which have the power to split up combinations of atoms which they proceed to combine afresh in a diametrically opposite order, corresponding to another type.” #MarcelProust #WithinABuddingGrove

“The names which designate things correspond invariably to an intellectual notion, alien to our true impressions, and compelling us to eliminate from them everything that is not in keeping with that notion.” #MarcelProust #WithinABuddingGrove

“One becomes moral as soon as one is unhappy.” #MarcelProust #WithinABuddingGrove

“The truth which one puts into one’s words does not carve out a direct for itself, is not irresistibly self-evident. A considerable time must elapse before a truth of the same order can take shape in them.” #MarcelProust #WithinABuddingGrove

“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.” #MarcelProust #WithinABuddingGrove

“One is not very particular, nor a very good judge, about things which no longer matter to one.” #MarcelProust #WithinABuddingGrove

“We are, when we are in love, in an abnormal state, capable of giving at once to the most apparently simple accident, an accident which may at any moment occur, a seriousness which in itself it would not entail.” #MarcelProust #WithinABuddingGrove

“There can be no peace of mind in love, since what one has obtained is never anything but a new starting-point for further desires.” #MarcelProust #WithinABuddingGrove

“It is always thus, impelled by a state of mind which is destined not to last, that we make our irrevocable decisions.” #MarcelProust #WithinABuddingGrove

“...failure to understand a joke has never yet made anyone find it less amusing...” #MarcelProust #WithinABuddingGrove

“...genius, and even great talent, springs less from seeds of intellect and social refinement superior to those of other people than from the faculty of transforming and transposing them.” #MarcelProust #WithinABuddingGrove

“Nine tenths of the ills from which intelligent people suffer spring from their intellect.” #MarcelProust #WithinABuddingGrove

“Names, no doubt, are whimsical draughtsmen, giving us of people as well as of places sketches so unlike the reality that we often experience a kind of stupor when we have before our eyes, in place of the imagined, the visible world...” #MarcelProust #WithinABuddingGrove

“...for we alone, by our belief that they have an existence of their own, can give to certain things we see a soul which they afterwards keep and which they develop in their own minds.” #MarcelProust #WithinABuddingGrove

“Let us try to imagine the shocking disparities we should find, if we did not take account of the future and the changes it must bring, in a horoscope of our own riper years cast for us in our youth.” #MarcelProust #WithinABuddingGrove

“...less disappointing than life, great works of art do not begin by giving us the best of themselves.” #MarcelProust #WithinABuddingGrove

“It is only people incapable of dissecting what at first sight appears indivisible in their perception who believe that one’s position is an integral part of one’s person.” #MarcelProust #WithinABuddingGrove

“I marveled at the impotence of the mind, the reason and the heart to effect the least conversion, to solve a single one of those difficulties which subsequently life, without one’s so much knowing how it went about it, so easily unravels.” #MarcelProust #WithinABuddingGrove

“Our desires cut across one another, and in this confused existence it is rare for happiness to coincide with the desire that clamoured for it.” #MarcelProust #WithinABuddingGrove