Jason > Jason's Quotes

“It is better by noble boldness to run the risk of being subject to half of the evils we anticipate than to remain in cowardly listlessness for fear of what might happen.”
― Herodotus, The Histories

“Of all men’s miseries the bitterest is this: to know so much and to have control over nothing.”
― Herodotus, The Histories

“I felt myself still reliving a past which was no longer anything more than the history of another person; my ego in a sense cloven in twain, while its upper extremity was already hard and frigid, burned still at its base whenever a spark made the old current pass through it, even after my mind had long ceased to conceive Albertine. And as no image of her accompanied the cruel palpitations, the tears that were brought to my eyes by a cold wind blowing as at Balbec upon the apple trees that were already pink with blossom, I was led to ask myself whether the renewal of my grief was not due to entirely pathological causes and whether what I took to be the revival of a memory and the final period of a state of love was not rather the first stage of heart-disease.”
― Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time

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

“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

“If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less, but to dream more, to dream all the time.”
― Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past Volumes 1-3 Box Set

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

“It comes so soon, the moment when there is nothing left to wait for.”
― Marcel Proust

“Like many intellectuals, he was incapable of saying a simple thing in a simple way”
― Marcel Proust

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

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

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

“There is no one, no matter how wise he is, who has not in his youth said
things or done things that are so unpleasant to recall in later life that
he would expunge them entirely from his memory if that were possible.”
― Marcel Proust

“It is our imagination that is responsible for love, not the other person.”
― Marcel Proust

“All our final decisions are made in a state of mind that is not going to last.”
― Marcel Proust, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower

“I wished to see storms only on those coasts where they raged with most violence...”
― Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove

“Mystery is not about traveling to new places but about looking with new eyes.”
― Marcel Proust

“Nine tenths of the ills from which intelligent people suffer spring from their intellect.”
― Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past: Volume I - Swann's Way & Within a Budding Grove

“To be an artist is to fail, as no other dare to fail... failure is his world and the shrink from it desertion”
― Marcel Proust

“Happiness serves hardly any other purpose than to make unhappiness possible. ”
― Marcel Proust

“I felt myself still reliving a past which was no longer anything more than the history of another person;”
― Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time

“in my cowardice I became at once a man, and did what all we grown men do when face to face with suffering and injustice; I preferred not to see them”
― Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way

“But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.”
― Marcel Proust