Siera Mae > Siera's Quotes

“Now are the woods all black, but still the sky is blue.
May you always see a blue sky overhead, my young friend; and then, even when the time comes, which is coming now for me, when the woods are all black, when night is fast falling, you will be able to console yourself, as I am doing, by looking up to the sky.”
― Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”
― Marcel Proust

“Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.”
― Marcel Proust

“Desire makes everything blossom; possession makes everything wither and fade. ”
― Marcel Proust

“The true paradises are the paradises that we have lost.”
― Marcel Proust

“Time, which changes people, does not alter the image we have of them.”
― Marcel Proust

“our social personality is created by the thoughts of other people. Even the simple act which we describe as “seeing some one we know” is, to some extent, an intellectual process. We pack the physical outline of the creature we see with all the ideas we have already formed about him, and in the complete picture of him which we compose in our minds those ideas have certainly the principal place.”
― Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time [volumes 1 to 7]

“Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.”
― Marcel Proust

“Always try to keep a patch of sky above your life.”
― Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way

“Love is a striking example of how little reality means to us.”
― Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time

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

“People do not die for us immediately, but remain bathed in a sort of aura of life which bears no relation to true immortality but through which they continue to occupy our thoughts in the same way as when they were alive. It is as though they were traveling abroad.”
― Marcel Proust

“There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we believe we left without having lived them, those we spent with a favorite book.”
― Marcel Proust, Days of Reading

“It is often hard to bear the tears that we ourselves have caused.”
― Marcel Proust

“The bonds between ourselves and another person exists only in our minds. Memory as it grows fainter loosens them, and notwithstanding the illusion by which we want to be duped and which, out of love, friendship, politeness, deference, duty, we dupe other people, we exist alone. Man is the creature who cannot escape from himself, who knows other people only in himself, and when he asserts the contrary, he is lying.”
― Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time

“Now are the woods all black,
But still the sky is blue.”
― Marcel Proust , Swann’s Way

“And so it is with our own past. It is a labour in vain to attempt to recapture it: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile. The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) of which we have no inkling. And it depends on chance whether or not we come upon this object before we ourselves must die.”
― Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way

“And so it is with our own past. It is a labour in vain to recapture it: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile. The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) which we do not suspect. And as for that object, it depends on chance whether we come upon it or not before we ourselves must die.”
― Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way

“I have every useless thing in the world in my house there. The only thing wanting is the necessary thing, a great patch of open sky like this. Always try to keep a patch of sky above your life, little boy,” he added, turning to me. “You have a soul in you of rare quality, an artist’s nature; never let it starve for lack of what it needs.”
― Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time: The Complete Masterpiece

“there are only two sources of human vice—idleness and superstition, and only two virtues—activity and intelligence.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“He stepped down, trying not to look long at her, as if she were the sun, yet he saw her, like the sun, even without looking.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“I simply state that I'm a product of a versatile mind in a restless generation-with every reason to throw my mind and pen in with the radicals. Even if, deep in my heart, I thought we were all blind atoms in a world as limited as a stroke of a pendulum, I and my sort would struggle against tradition; try, at least, to displace old cants with new ones. I've thought I was right about life at various times, but faith is difficult. One thing I know. If living isn't seeking for the grail it may be a damned amusing game.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“Now they were as strangers; worse than strangers, for they could never become acquainted.”
― Jane Austen, Persuasion

“The sixth of January, 1482, is not, however, a day of which history has preserved the memory. There was nothing notable in the event which thus set the bells and the bourgeois of Paris in a ferment from early morning. It was neither an assault by the Picards nor the Burgundians, nor a hunt led along in procession, nor a revolt of scholars in the town of Laas, nor an entry of “our much dread lord, monsieur the king,” nor even a pretty hanging of male and female thieves by the courts of Paris. Neither was it the arrival, so frequent in the fifteenth”
― Victor Hugo, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame

“If you can look into the seeds of time And say which grain will grow and which will not, Speak, then, to me, who neither beg nor fear Your favors nor your hate.”
― William Shakespeare, Macbeth

“Let every man be master of his time.”
― William Shakespeare, Macbeth

“To die, - To sleep, - To sleep!
Perchance to dream: - ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“Some Cupid kills with arrows, some with traps.”
― William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing

“By the pricking of my thumbs,
Something wicked this way comes.”
― William Shakespeare, Macbeth

“So fair and foul a day I have not seen.”
― William Shakespeare, Macbeth