For a long time I would go to bed early. [Fr., Longtemps, je me suis couche de bonne heure.]
Poets 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.
It is only with the passions of others that we are ever really familiar, and what we come to discover about our own can only be learned from them.
The truth has no need to be uttered to be made apparent, and ... one may perhaps gather it with more certainty, without waiting for words and without even taking any account of them, from countless outward signs, even from certain invisible phenomena, analogous in the sphere of human character to what atmospheric changes are in the physical world.
There was nothing abnormal about it when homosexuality was the norm.
Unkind people imagine themselves to be inflicting pain on someone equally unkind.
There is no idea that does not carry in itself a possible refutation, no word that does not imply its opposite.
Habit! that skillful but slow arranger, which starts out by letting our spirit suffer for weeks in a temporary state, but that thespirit is after all happy to discover, for without habit and reduced to its own resources, the spirit would be unable to make any lodgings seem habitable.
Similarly the men who produce works of genius are not those who live in the most delicate atmosphere, whose conversation is most brilliant, or their culture broadest, but those who have had the power, ceasing in a moment to live only for themselves, to make use of their personality as of a mirror.
The true paradises are the paradises that we have lost.
It is a mistake to speak of a bad choice in love, since, as soon as a choice exists, it can only be bad.
We strive all the time to give our life its form, but we do so by copying willy-nilly, like a drawing, the features of the person that we are and not of the person we should like to be.
I drank a second mouthful in which I find nothing more than in the first, then a third which gives me rather less than the second. It is time to stop; the potion is losing its magic.
For often I have wished to see a person again without realising that it was simply because that personal recalled to me a hedge of hawthorns in blossom, and I have been led to believe, and to make someone else believe, in a renewal of affection, by what was no more than an inclination to travel.
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.
Any mental activity is easy if it need not be subjected to reality.
Proust was the greatest novelist of the twentieth century, just as Tolstoy was in the nineteenth.
We ought at least, from prudence, never to speak of ourselves, because that is a subject on which we may be sure that other people's views are never in accordance with our own.
Love is an incurable malady like those pathetic states in which rheumatism affords the sufferer a brief respite only to be replaced by epileptiform headaches.
Adultery breathes new life into marriages which have been left for dead.
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.
I was left alone there in the company of the orchids, roses and violets, which, like people waiting beside you who do not know you, preserved a silence which their individuality as living things made all the more striking, and warmed themselves in the heat of a glowing coal fire.
Reading is at the threshold of spiritual life; it can introduce us to it; it does not constitute it. There are, however, certain cases, certain pathological cases, so to speak, of spiritual depression in which reading can become a sort of curative discipline and assume the task, through repeated stimulation, of continuously reintroducing a lazy mind into the life of the spirit.
The reason why a work of genius is not easily admired from the first is that the man who has created it is extraordinary, that few other men resemble him. It is his work itself that, by fertilising the rare minds capable of understanding it, will make them increase and multiply.
Conversation, which is friendship's mode of expression, is a superficial digression which gives us nothing worth acquiring. We may talk for a lifetime without doing more than indefinitely repeat the vacuity of a minute.
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