"The Guermantes Way" Quotes

The only true voyage of discovery, the only fountain of Eternal Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another.

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.

Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.

The fact that pleasure is not lasting does not prevent it from being intense.

Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself. The writer's work is only a kind of optical instrument he provides the reader so he can discern what he might never have seen in himself without this book. The reader's recognition in himself of what the book says is the proof of the book's truth.

One must never miss an opportunity of quoting things by others which are always more interesting than those one thinks up oneself.

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

People whose love is complete grow like plants, absorbing something of the earth, the sun, and the air. They can be strong or weak, it makes no difference, like plants they are nourished by the sun.

We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world.

In reality, every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self.