Quotes, Quotations and Sayings

The one thing more difficult than following a regimen is not imposing it on others.

Love is space and time measured by the heart.

We become moral when we are unhappy.

A cathedral, a wave of storm, a dancer's leap, never turn out to be as high as we had hoped.

Let us leave pretty women to men devoid of imagination.

San Francisco, n.: Marcel Proust editing an issue of Penthouse.

A catherdral, a wave of storm, a dancer's leap, never turn out to be as high as we had hoped.

A powerful idea communicates some of its strength to him who challenges it.

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

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

The charms of a passing woman are usually in direct relation to the speed of her passing.

What a profound significance small things assume when the woman we love conceals them from us.

The charms of the passing woman are generally in direct proportion to the swiftness of her passing.

A woman one loves rarely suffices for all our needs, so we deceive her with another whom we do not love.

It is always during a passing state of mind that we make lasting resolutions.

Impelled by a state of mind which is destined not to last, we make our irrevocable decisions

People who are not in love fail to understand how an intelligent man can suffer because of a very ordinary woman. This is like being surprised that anyone should be stricken with cholera because of a creature so insignificant as the comma bacillus.

Our intellect is not the most subtle, the most powerful, the most appropriate, instrument for revealing the truth. It is life that, little by little, example by example, permits us to see that what is most important to our heart, or to our mind, is learned not by reasoning but through other agencies. Then it is that the intellect, observing their superiority, abdicates its control to them upon reasoned grounds and agrees to become their collaborator and lackey.

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

The opinions we hold of one another, our relations with friends and kinfolk are in no sense permanent, save in appearance, but are as eternally fluid as the sea itself.

Happiness serves hardly any other purpose than to make unhappiness possible.

There's nothing like desire to prevent the things one says from having any resemblance to the things in one's mind.

It is comforting when one has a sorrow to lie in the warmth of one's bed and there, abandoning all effort and all resistance, to bury even one's head under the cover, giving one's self up to it completely, moaning like branches in the autumn wind. But there is still a better bed, full of divine odors. It is our sweet, our profound, our impenetrable friendship.

All our final decisions are made in a state of mind that is not going to last.

The bonds that unite another person to our self exist only in our mind.

The happy man is not he who seems thus to others, but who seems thus to himself.

A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left.

There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book.

Civilization is an active deposit which is formed by the combustion of the present with the past. Neither in countries without a Present nor in those without a Past is it to be encountered. Proust in Venice, Matisse's birdcages overlooking the flower market at Nice, Gide on the seventeenth-century quais of Toulon, Lorca in Granada, Picasso by Saint-Germain-des-PrTs: there lies civilization and for me it can exist only under those liberal regimes in which the Present is alive and therefore capable of assimilating the Past.

I understood that all the material of a literary work was in my past life, I understood that I had acquired it in the midst of frivolous amusements, in idleness, in tenderness and in pain, stored up by me without my divining its destination or even its survival, as the seed has in reserve all the ingredients which will nourish the plant.

We say that the hour of death cannot be forecast, but when we say this we imagine that hour as placed in an obscure and distant future. It never occurs to us that it has any connection with the day already begun or that death could arrive this same afternoon, this afternoon which is so certain and which has every hour filled in advance.

We do not succeed in changing things according to our desire, but gradually our desire changes.

For each illness that doctors cure with medicine, they provoke ten in healthy people by inoculating them with the virus that is a thousand times more powerful than any microbe: the idea that one is ill.

The features of our face are hardly more than gestures which force of habit made permanent. Nature, like the destruction of Pompeii, like the metamorphosis of a nymph into a tree, has arrested us in an accustomed movement.

The regularity of a habit is generally in proportion to its absurdity.

Often it is just lack of imagination that keeps a man from suffering very much.

The human plagiarism which is most difficult to avoid, for individuals... is the plagiarism of ourselves.

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

Lies are essential to humanity. They are perhaps as important as the pursuit of pleasure and moreover are dictated by that pursuit.

Time passes, and little by little everything that we have spoken in falsehood becomes true.

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

That translucent alabaster of our memories.

Our memory is like a shop in the window of which is exposed now one, now another photograph of the same person. And as a rule the most recent exhibit remains for some time the only one to be seen.

We are able to find everything in our memory, which is like a dispensary or chemical laboratory in which chance steers our hand sometimes to a soothing drug and sometimes to a dangerous poison.

Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and composed our masterpieces.

Everything great that we know has come from neurotics? never will the world be aware of how much it owes to them, nor above all what they have suffered in order to bestow their gifts on it.

Neurosis has an absolute genius for malingering. There is no illness which it cannot counterfeit perfectly. If it is capable of deceiving the doctor, how should it fail to deceive the patient?

The ''sensitiveness'' claimed by neurotic is matched by their egotism: they cannot abide the flaunting by others of the sufferings to which they pay an even increasing amount of attention in themselves.

The paradoxes of today are the prejudices of tomorrow, since the most benighted and the most deplorable prejudices have had their moment of novelty when fashion lent them its fragile grace.

The moments of the past do not remain still; they retain in our memory the motion which drew them towards the future, towards a future which has itself become the past, and draw us on in their train.