Sodom And Gomorrah Proust Quotes

It is not only by dint of lying to others, but also of lying to ourselves, that we cease to notice that we are lying.

But sometimes the future is latent in us without our knowing it, and our supposedly lying words foreshadow an imminent reality.

Illness is the most heeded of doctors: to kindness and wisdom we make promises only; pain we obey.

Then from those profound slumbers we awake in a dawn, not knowing who we are, being nobody, newly born, ready for anything, the brain emptied of that past which was life until then. And perhaps it is more wonderful still when our landing at the waking-point is abrupt and the thoughts of our sleep, hidden by a cloak of oblivion, have no time to return to us gradually, before sleep ceases. Then, from the black storm through which we seem to have passed (but we do not even say we), we emerge prostrate, without a thought, a we that is void of content.

...that melancholy which we feel when we cease to obey orders which, from one day to another, keep the future hidden, and realise that we have at last begun to live in real earnest, as a grown-up person, the life, the only life that any of us has at his disposal.

...the nose is generally the organ in which stupidity is most readily displayed.

The being that I shall be after death has no more reason to remember the man I have been since my birth than the latter to remember what I was before it.

Parties of this sort are as a rule premature. They have little reality until the following day, when they occupy the attention of the people who were not invited.

I felt that I did not really remember her except through the pain, and I longed for the nails that riveted her to my consciousness to be driven yet deeper.

It is often simply from lack of creative imagination that we do not go far enough in suffering.

His nature was really like a sheet of paper that has been folded so often in every direction that it is impossible to straighten it out.

The theatre of the world is stocked with fewer settings than actors, and with fewer actors than situations.

M. de Charlus made no reply and looked as if he had not heard, which was one of his favourite forms of rudeness.

...the seaside life and the life of travel made me realise that the theatre of the world is stocked with fewer settings than actors, and with fewer actors than situations.

The mistakes of doctors are innumerable. They err as a rule out of optimism as to the treatment, and pessimism as to the outcome.

After a certain age, and even if we develop in quite different ways, the more we become ourselves, the more our family traits are accentuated.

We do not include the pleasures we enjoy in sleep in the inventory of the pleasures we have experienced in the course of our existence.

Hence one meets in polite society few novelists, or poets, few of all those sublime creatures who speak of the things that are not to be mentioned.

...the rule among the human race – a rule that naturally admits of exceptions – is that the reputedly hard are the weak whom nobody wanted, and that the strong, caring little whether they are wanted or not, have alone that gentleness which the vulgar herd mistakes for weakness.

There was a time when my ancestors were proud of the title of chamberlain or butler to the King," said the Baron. "There was also a time," replied Morel haughtily, "when my ancestors cut off your ancestors' heads.

A man who, night after night, falls like a lump of lead upon his bed, and ceases to live until the moment when he wakes and rises, will such a man ever dream of making, I do not say great discoveries, but even minute observations upon sleep? He barely knows that he does sleep. A little insomnia is not without its value in making us appreciate sleep, in throwing a ray of light upon that darkness. A memory without fault is not a very powerful incentive to studying the phenomena of memory.

When you come to live with a woman, you will soon cease to see anything of what made you love; though it is true that the two sundered elements can be reunited by jealousy.

As profession recognizes profession, so, too, does vice.

Unfortunately, in the social as in the political world, the victims are such cowards that one cannot for long remain indignant with their executioners.

As by an electric current that gives us a shock, I have been shaken by my loves, I have lived them, I have felt them: never have I succeeded in seeing or thinking them.

Composers were warned not to strain the attention of their audience, as though we had not at our disposal different degrees of attention, among which it rests precisely with the artist himself to arouse the highest. For those who yawn with boredom after ten lines of a mediocre article have journeyed year after year to Bayreuth to listen to the Ring.

I remained serious. For one thing, I thought it stupid of her to appear to believe or to wish other people to believe that nobody, really, was as smart as herself. For another thing, people who laugh so heartily at what they themselves have said, when it is not funny, dispense us accordingly, by taking upon themselves the responsibility for the mirth, from joining in it.

...infirmity alone makes us take notice and learn, and enables us to analyse mechanisms of which otherwise we should know nothing. A man who falls straight into bed night after night, and ceases to live until the moment when he wakes and rises, will surely never dream of making, I don't say great discoveries, but even minor observations about sleep. He scarcely knows that he is asleep. A little insomnia is not without its value in making us appreciate sleep, in throwing a ray of light upon that darkness. An unfailing memory is not a very powerful incentive to the study of the phenomena of memory.

We should be forever cured of our romanticism were we willing, in order to think of the one we love, to try to be the person we shall be once we no longer love them.

But for the invert vice begins, not when he establishes a relationship (for too many reasons may govern that), but when he takes his pleasure with women.

I never much like thus being told without possibility of reply what I am to think about people whom I know.

Then came the deglutition of saliva, and the old lady instinctively wiped the stubble of her toothbrush moustache with her handkerchief.

This rubicund youth, with his blunt features, appeared for all the world to have a tomato instead of a head.

It's far more difficult to disfigure a great work of art than to create one.

For with the perturbations of memory are linked the intermittencies of the heart.

E seus olhares aliciantes, aumentados pelos seus sorrisos, não eram mais contidos pelos vidros dos óculos e transbordavam por todos os lados.

انسان بسیار هوشمند کمتر از احمق به حماقت دیگران توجه نشان می‌دهد

کار ذهنن تا زمانی که مطیع واقعیت نیست آسان است

از شکل انداختن یک شاهکار خیلی از ساختن‌اش مشکل‌تر است

عیب‌های یک آشنای ساده، یا حتی یک دوست، زهرایی واقعی‌اند که خوشبختانه خود را در برابرشان به روش ذره ذره با همان زهر مصون کرده‌ایم

از همه‌ی پنهان‌گری‌ها خطرناک‌تر، اختفای خطا در ذهن خطاکارست.

هر خطای برطرف شده آدمی را از حس تازه‌ای برخوردا می‌کند

Like everybody who is not in love, he imagined that one chooses the person one loves after endless deliberation and on the strength of diverse qualities and advantages.

And then one goes on to the next. Because love is all rot, you know

Omul visează mult despre rai, sau mai degrabă desper numeroase raiuri succesive, dar toate sunt chiar înainte de a muri niște paradisuri pierdute sau în care s-au simțit pierduți.

کمی بیخوابی برای شناخت ارزش و مفهوم خواب، برای تابانیدن اندک روشنایی به این تاریکی، بیفایده نیست. حافظۀ بی‌خلل انگیزۀ چندان نیرومندی برای بررسی پدیده‌های حافظه نیست

حسّ گذرایی همه چیز که موجب می‌شود بخواهیم همه کارمان به نتیجه بیانجامد منظرۀ هر عشقی را رقت‌انگیز می‌کند

واقعی با امکان‌های پنهان ماندن سازگاری دارد، تا زمانی که شرایطی این امکان‌ها را از آن بگیرد

اهل هر صنفی زود همدیگر را می‌شناسند، اهل هر عیبی همچنین

گاهی آینده در درون ماست بی آن که خود بدانیم، و گفته‌هایی از ما که دروغ انگاشته می‌شود از واقعیتی در آینده نزدیک خبر می‌دهد

We ought never to lose our tempers with people who, when we find them at fault, begin to snigger. They do so not because they are laughing at us, but because they are afraid of our displeasure.

بخشی از خستگی‌های حتی بسیار واقعی، بویژه نزد آدمهای عصبی، به توجه بستگی دارد و فقط حافظه از آن نگهداری می‌کند. همین که از خستگی می‌ترسیم احساس خستکی می‌کنیم و برای رفعش همین بس که از یادش ببریم

We passionately long for there to be another life in which we shall be similar to what we are here below. But we do not pause to reflect that, even without waiting for that other life, in this life, after a few years, we are unfaithful to what we once were, to what we wished to remain immortally. Even without supposing that death is to alter us more completely than the changes that occur in the course of our lives, if in that other life we were to encounter the self that we have been, we should turn away from ourselves as from those people with whom we were once on friendly terms but whom we have not seen for years… We dream much of a paradise, or rather of a number of successive paradises, but each of them is, long before we die, a paradise lost, in which we should feel ourselves lost too.

(...) emprestando-lhe formas encantadoras de simplicidade, de aparente franqueza, e até de uma altivez independente que parecia inspirada pelo desinteresse. Isso era falso, mas a vantagem da atitude estava bem mais a favor de Morel, considerando-se que, enquanto aquele que ama está sempre forçado a voltar à carga, a insistir, pelo contrário, é fácil ao que não ama seguir uma linha reta, inflexível e graciosa.

Soon, what was tedious was everything. 'Beautiful things, they're so tedious! Paintings, they're enough to drive you mad...How right you are, it's so tedious, writing letters!' In the end it was life itself that she declared to us was a bore, without one quite knowing from where she was taking her term of comparison.

I concluded all the same from this first evening that his [Morel's] must be a vile nature, that he would not shrink from any act of servility if the need arose, and was incapable of gratitude. In which he resembled the majority of mankind.

There is no need, in order to explain three-quarters of the opinions held about people, to go so far as a love that has been spurned or an exclusion from political power. Our judgment remains unsure: an invitation refused or received determines it.

In the case of Albertine, I felt that I should never discover anything, that, out of that tangled mass of details of fact and falsehood, I should never unravel the truth: and that it would always be so, unless I were to shut her up in prison (but prisoners escape) until the end.

É muita vez apenas por falta de espírito criador que não se vai bastante longe no sofrimento. E a realidade mais terrível dá, ao mesmo tempo que o sofrimento, a alegria de uma bela descoberta, porque não faz senão dar uma forma nova e clara ao que ruminávamos desde muito sem o saber.

Muitas vezes, é unicamente por falta de espírito criador que não se vai muito longe no sofrimento. E a mais terrível realidade nos concede, ao mesmo tempo que o sofrimento, a alegria de uma bela descoberta, porque só faz doar uma forma clara e nova ao que ruminávamos há muito sem desconfiar.

He lives at Balbec?” crooned the Baron in a tone so far from interrogatory that it is regrettable that the written language does not possess a sign other than the question mark to end such apparently unquestioning remarks. It is true that such a sign would be of little use except to M. de Charlus.

...Swann had, as he shook the Marquise's hand, seen her bosom from close to and from above, he plunged an attentive, serious, absorbed, almost anxious, gaze into the depths of her corsage, and his nostrils, intoxicated by the woman's perfume, quivered like a butterfly ready to go and settle on the half-glimpsed flower.

We get anxious, and it is sometimes long after the hour of danger, which a subsequent distraction has made us forget, that we remember our anxiety.

[A] man of great talent will normally pay less attention to other people’s foolishness than would a fool.

For to the disturbances of memory are linked the intermittences of the heart.

For the very ones who are right, like Françoise, have also to be wrong, so that Justice becomes an impossibility

We dream a great deal of paradise, or, rather, of numerous successive paradises, but they are all, long before we die, paradises lost, in which we would feel lost.

like the thin, fragile rind, then like the fresh quarter of a fruit that an invisible knife had begun to peel in the sky.

But, don’t you see, since we happened to have M. de Cambremer here, and he is a Marquis, while you are only a Baron. . . . ” “Pardon me,” M. de Charlus replied with an arrogant air to the astonished Verdurin, “I am also Duc de Brabant, Damoiseau de Montargis, Prince d’Oloron, de Carency, de Viareggio and des Dunes. However, it is not of the slightest importance. Please do not distress yourself,” he concluded, resuming his subtle smile which spread itself over these final words: “I could see at a glance that you were not accustomed to society.

But you are our equal, if not our superior," the Guermantes seemed, in all their actions, to be saying; and they said it in the nicest way imaginable, in order to be loved and admired, but not to be believed; that one should discern the fictitious character of this affability was what they called being well-bred; to suppose it to be genuine, a sign of ill-breeding.

In point of fact, we always discover after the event that our adversaries had a reason for taking the side they do take, and one that does not depend on the degree to which that side is in the right, and that those who think as we do have been constrained to do so by, if their moral nature is too contemptible to be invoked, intelligence, and if they have no great acumen, uprightness.

...As for all the little people who call themselves Marquis de Cambremerde or de Gotoblazes, there is no difference between them and the humblest rookie in your regiment. Whether you go and do wee-wee at the Countess Cack's or cack at the Baroness Wee-wee's, it's exactly the same, you will have compromised your reputation and have used a shitty rag instead of toilet paper. Which is unsavoury.

Often, when, in the hall of the casino, two girls felt desire for each other, there was produced something like a phenomenon of light, a sort of trail of phosphorescence leading from one to the other.

The question isn’t, as for Hamlet, to be or not to be, but to be one of them or not to be one of them. You’re one, my uncle Charlus is one. What d’you expect? I’ve never liked all that, it’s not my fault.

The images selected by memory are as arbitrary, as narrow, as elusive as those which the imagination had formed and reality has destroyed. There is no reason why, existing outside ourselves, a real place should conform to the pictures in our memory rather than those in our dreams. And besides, a fresh reality will perhaps make us forget, detest even, the desires on account of which we set out on our journey.

think I would be lying if I said that the painful and perpetual mistrust that Albertine was to inspire in me had already begun, let alone the particular, above all Gomorran, character which that mistrust was to assume.

The hurt that his remarks concerning Albertine and Andrée had caused me was profound, but the worst of the pain was not felt by me right away, as happens in those cases of poisoning that take effect only after a certain interval of time.

So as not to see anything any more, I turned towards the wall, but alas, what was now facing me was that partition which used to serve us as a morning messenger, that partition which, as responsive as a violin in rendering every nuance of a feeling, reported so exactly to my grandmother my fear at once of waking her and, if she were already awake, of not being heard by her and so of her not coming, then immediately, like a second instrument taking up the melody, informing me of her coming and bidding me be calm. I dared not put out my hand to that wall, any more than to a piano on which my grandmother had been playing and which still vibrated from her touch. I knew that I might knock now, even louder, that nothing would wake her any more, that I should hear no response, that my grandmother would never come again. And I asked nothing more of God, if a paradise exists, than to be able, there, to knock on that wall with the three little raps which my grandmother would recognize among a thousand, and to which she would give those answering knocks which meant: "Don't fuss, little mouse, I know you're impatient, but I'm coming," and that he would let me stay with her throughout eternity, which would not be too long for the two of us.

I understood for the first time that the fixed, tearless gaze (which meant that Françoise felt little pity for her) that she had had since my grandmother’s death had been dwelling on this incomprehensible contradiction between memory and nothingness.

Mme Verdurin asked him: "Did you have some of my orangeade?" Whereupon M. de Charlus, with a gracious smile, in a crystalline tone which he rarely adopted, and with endless simperings and wrigglings of the hips, replied: "No, I preferred its neighbour, which is strawberry-juice, I think. It's delicious."[...]But on hearing M. de Charlus say, in that shrill voice and with that smile and those gestures, "No, I preferred its neighbour, the strawberry-juice," one could say: "Ah, he likes the stronger sex,"[...]

I had allowed myself to murmur a few impatient and hurtful words, which, I had sensed from the way her face contracted, had struck home, had wounded her; it was I whom they were lacerating, now that the consolation of a thousand kisses was forever impossible.

to understand that the rule among humankind—which allows of exceptions, naturally—is that the hard are the weak whom no one has wanted, and that the strong alone, caring little whether they are wanted or not, have that gentleness that the crowd mistakes for weakness.

World of sleep, where our inner knowledge, held in subjugation by the disturbances in our organs, quickens the rhythm of our heart or of our breathing, for the same dosage of alarm, of sadness, of remorse is a hundred times more potent when thus injected into out veins; as soon as, in order to travel along the arteries of the subterranean city, we have embarked on the dark waves of our own blood, as if on the sixfold meanders of some eternal Lethe, tall, solemn forms appear to us, accost us, and then go from us, leaving us in tears.

thus, in a wild desire to hurl myself into her arms, it was only at this instant—more than a year after her funeral, on account of the anachronism which so often prevents the calendar of facts from coinciding with that of our feelings—that I had just learned she was dead.

Who has not observed this fact with women, or even with men, endowed with a remarkable intelligence, but afflicted by nervousness? When they are happy, at peace, content with their surroundings, they cause us to admire their precious gifts; it is literally the truth that speaks through their mouths. A migraine, some small puncturing of their amour-propre is enough to change everything. The luminous intelligence, abrupt, convulsive, shrunken, now reflects only a self that is irritated, suspicious, coquettish, doing all it can to be unattractive.

but beneath the words and thoughts of an ungrateful, selfish, and cruel young man there had never been anything that might resemble my grandmother, for, in my frivolity, my love of pleasure, and accustomed as I was to seeing her as an invalid, I contained within me the memory of what she had been only in a virtual state.

I would have liked to make the skeptics acknowledge that death is in truth an illness from which we recover. Only I did not find in my grandmother the rich spontaneity of old. Her words were only an enfeebled, docile response, a mere echo almost, of my own words; she was no longer anything more than the reflection of my own thoughts.

But, just as we are devoid of that sense of direction with which certain birds are endowed, so we lack the sense of visibility as we lack that of distances, imagining as close the concerned attention of people who, on the contrary, never give us a thought, and not suspecting that during this same time we are the sole preoccupation of others.

But the second kind seek out the women who love women, who can procure a young man for them and add to the pleasure which they get from finding themselves with him; much more, they can, in the same way, find the same pleasure with them as with a man. [...] For in the relationships they have with them, they play the role of another woman for the women who love women, and the woman offers them at the same time more or less what they find in a man, so that the jealous friend suffers from feeling that the man he loves is inseparable from the woman who is for him almost a man, at the same time as he feels him almost escaping from him, because, for these women, he is something he does not know, a sort of woman.

Albertine, sentada à minha frente e vendo que chegara a seu destino, deu alguns passos do fundo do vagão onde estávamos e abriu a portinhola. Mas esse movimento, que ela assim fazia para descer, me dilacerava intoleravelmente o coração, como se, ao contrário da posição independente de meu corpo, que a dois passos dele parecia ocupar o de Albertine, tal separação espacial, que um desenhista verídico seria forçado a figurar entre nós, não passasse de uma aparência, e como se, para quem quisesse redesenhar as coisas conforme a realidade verdadeira, fosse preciso agora colocar Albertine, não a certa distância de mim, mas dentro de mim. Ela me fazia tanto mal ao se afastar que, agarrando-a, puxei-a desesperadamente pelo braço.

It is no doubt the existence of our body, similar for us to a vase in which our spirituality is enclosed, that induces us to suppose that all our inner goods, our past joys, all our sorrows, are perpetually in our possession. Perhaps this is as inaccurate as to believe that they escape or return. At all events, if they do remain inside us, it is for most of the time in an unknown domain where they are of no service to us, and where even the most ordinary of them are repressed by memories of a different order, which exclude all simultaneity with them in our consciousness. But if the framework of sensations in which they are preserved be recaptured, they have in their turn the same capacity to expel all that is incompatible with them, to install in us, on its own, the self that experienced them.

Once she is dead, we would feel qualms about being other; we now admire only what she was, what we already were, but mixed in with something else, and what henceforth we shall be alone. It is in this sense (and not in that very vague, very false sense in which it is generally understood) that we can say that death is not without its use, that the dead person continues to exercise an influence on us.

But never again would I be able to erase that contraction from her face, or that suffering from her heart, or, rather, from my own; for, since the dead exist only in us, it is ourselves that we strike unrelentingly when we persist in remembering the blows we have dealt them. I clung to these sorrows, however cruel they might be, with all my strength, for I felt that they were the effect of my memory of my grandmother, the proof that this memory which I had was indeed present in me.

I had thought I could never, such was the need I had to embrace her, wait for the hour I had still to spend without her. And now that this same need was reborn, I knew that I could wait for hour upon hour, that never again would she be beside me, I had made the discovery only now because I had just, on being aware of her for the first time, alive, real, swelling my heart to bursting, on meeting her again, that is, realized that I had lost her forever. Lost forever; I could not understand, and I applied myself to suffering the pain of this contradiction:

The person who had come to my assistance, who was rescuing me from my aridity of soul, was the one who, several years before, at an identical moment of distress and loneliness, a moment when I no longer had anything of myself, had entered, and who had restored me to myself, for it was both me and more than me (the container which is more than the content, and had brought it to me). I had just glimpsed, in my memory, bent over my fatigue, the tender, concerned, disappointed face of my grandmother, such as she had been on that first evening of our arrival;

Yet this simple situation suffices to demonstrate that even that universally decried thing, which would nowhere find anyone to defend it, “gossip,” has, whether we are ourselves its object, so that it then becomes particularly disagreeable, or whether it teaches us something we did not know about a third person, its psychological value. It prevents the mind from falling asleep over the factitious view that it takes of what it believes things to be like, which is only their outward appearance. It turns this inside out with the magical dexterity of an idealist philosopher and quickly offers us an unsuspected corner of the reverse side of the fabric.

In the old days, reflecting enviously on the hours that Mme de Guermantes spent with him, I had set such great store by seeing him! People never cease to change position in relation to ourselves. In the world’s imperceptible but everlasting march, we think of them as motionless, in a moment of vision, too brief for us to perceive the motion that is bearing them along. But we need only choose from our memory two pictures of them taken at different times, yet sufficiently close together for them not to have changed in themselves, perceptibly at least, and the difference between the two pictures measures the displacement they have effected relative to ourselves.

But a remark made by the woman we love does not preserve its purity for long; it spoils, it goes bad. One or two evenings later, Albertine’s words came back to me, and what they seemed to signify was no longer the bad upbringing that was a source of pride to her—and which could but make me smile—but something else, and that Albertine, perhaps even without any precise object, in order to excite the woman’s senses or to remind her mischievously of earlier propositions, accepted perhaps in the old days, had brushed quickly against her, had thought that I had perhaps found out about it, since it had been done in public, and had wanted to forestall an unfavorable interpretation.

And since he was inclined himself to the kind of irritating pretentiousness that he disapproved of—“What was the point of ‘turning on the charm’ for them so persistently if you don’t want to meet them again?”—I turned down his proposal, because I did not want to risk being parted from Albertine, but also because I was now detached from them. From them, that is to say, from myself. We desire passionately that there should be another life in which we would be similar to what we are here below. But we do not reflect that, even without waiting for that other life, but in this one, after a few years we are unfaithful to what we have been, to what we had wanted to remain immortally.

I thought then about all that I had learned of Swann’s love for Odette, and of the way in which Swann had been made a fool of all his life. Fundamentally, if I try to think about it, the hypothesis that led me little by little to construct Albertine’s whole character, and to interpret painfully each moment of a life I was unable to control in its entirety, was the memory, the idée fixe, of the character of Mme Swann, such as I had been told that it was like. These accounts helped to ensure that in future my imagination played the game of supposing that, instead of being a good girl, Albertine might have the same immorality, the same capacity for deception, as a former whore, and I thought of all the suffering that would have awaited me in that event had I ever had to love her.