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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

...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.

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.

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

کار ذهنن تا زمانی که مطیع واقعیت نیست آسان است

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

هر خطای برطرف شده آدمی را از حس تازه‌ای برخوردا 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

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

از همه‌ی پنهان‌گری‌ها خطرناک‌تر، اختفای خطا در ذهن خطاکارست.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

a man of great ability will ordinarily pay less attention to other people’s foolishness than would a fool.

But I could not help but be struck by how much more he had changed in relation to myself.

You got the impression of that equivocation where a religion speaks of immortality but means by it something that does not exclude nothingness.

But we do not like to show off to them relations who have remained what we have tried hard to cease from being.

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, 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.

Albertine would in any case either not have given me any answer or else a “no” in which the “n” would have been too hesitant and the “o” too resonant. Albertine never recounted facts that might harm her,

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.

There are certain Israelites, very shrewd and refined men of the world though they be, in whom a boor and a prophet remain in reserve, or in the wings, so as to make their entrance at a given moment in their lives, as in a play.

And so these women, either misunderstanding or else scorning the influence that publicity has today acquired, are fashionable for the Queen of Spain, but unrecognized by the crowd, because the first knows and the second do not know who they are.

But if no reply came from Morel, he could no longer sleep, he no longer knew a moment’s peace of mind, so many in number, indeed, are the things that we experience without knowing them, and the profound inner realities that remain hidden from us.

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,"[...]

With Albertine, I felt that I would never learn anything, would never succeed in unraveling this tangled multiplicity of authentic details and untruthful facts. And that it would always be thus, unless I were to put her in prison (but people escape) up until the end.

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.

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.

Having had time to come, Albertine must have arrived. I went straight to Françoise: “Is Mlle Albertine here?” “No one has come.” Good God, did that mean that no one would be coming? I was in torment, Albertine’s visit now seeming all the more desirable for being less certain.

Frankly, there are enough women without going and throwing yourself at that particular one,” he added; like all people who are not in love, he imagined that we choose the person we love after endless deliberation and after taking account of various qualities and kinds of suitability.

Erect, isolated, having at her side her husband and myself, the Duchesse stood on the left of the staircase, already wrapped in her Tiepolo cloak, the collar fastened by the clasp of rubies, being devoured by the eyes of women and of men seeking to chance upon the secret of her elegance and her beauty.

Love can thus be responsible for veritable geological upheavals of the mind. In that of M. de Charlus, which a few days earlier had resembled a plain so uniform that as far as the eye could reach it would have been impossible to make out an idea rising above the level surface, there had suddenly sprung into being, hard as stone, a range of mountains, but mountains as elaborately carved as if some sculptor, instead of quarrying and carting away the marble, had chiselled it on the spot, in which there writhed in vast titanic groups Fury, Jealousy, Curiosity, Envy, Hatred, Suffering, Pride, Terror and Love.

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.

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.

I could not accuse her of being unfeeling. The person that I was now with regard to her was the “witness” best qualified to understand what she herself had been. The slipcase and the agate marble had simply become for me, with regard to Albertine, what they had been for Gilberte, what they would have been for anyone who had not allowed the glow from an inner flame to play on them.

it is inevitable that the uncle who issues the reprimand should have more or less the same failings as the nephew he has been charged with berating. This is not the uncle being hypocritical, however, deceived as he is by the capacity men possess for believing that each fresh set of circumstances means that “things are different,” a capacity that enables them to adopt artistic, political, etc.,

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.

even the ups and downs in his relationship with me, all that thus far had appeared incoherent to my mind, became intelligible, showed itself to be self-evident, just as a sentence that had presented no meaning for as long as it remained broken up into letters arranged at random, expresses, if the characters find themselves restored to their rightful order, a thought we will not again be able to forget.

Vice (I put it thus for the sake of linguistic convenience), each person’s vice accompanies him in the same fashion as the genie who was invisible to men for as long as they were unaware of his presence. Kindness, double-dealing, reputation, our social relations do not let themselves be discovered; we carry them concealed. Ulysses himself did not at first recognize Athena.12 But the gods are immediately perceptible to the gods, as like equally soon is to like,

The similarity between the evanescent greetings of the Duchesse de Lambresac and those of my grandmother’s friends had begun to interest me, by demonstrating that in narrow and enclosed social circles, whether among the petty bourgeoisie or the high nobility, the old ways persist, enabling us to rediscover, like an archaeologist, how people may have been brought up, and the element of soul that it reflects, in the days of the Vicomte d’Arlincourt and Loïsa Puget.

The truth is that the similarity in dress, and the spirit of the age as it is echoed by the face, occupy so much more significant a place in someone than his caste, which occupies a large place only in the person in question’s self-esteem and in the imagination of others, that, to be made aware that a great nobleman of Louis-Philippe’s time differs less from a bourgeois of Louis-Philippe’s time than from a great nobleman of the time of Louis XV, there is no need to walk the galleries of the Louvre.

Thus it is that, in theory, we find we ought always to explain ourselves frankly, to avoid misunderstandings. But very often life combines these in such a way that, in order to dispel them, in the rare circumstances when that might prove possible, we would have to reveal either—which was not the case here—something that would offend our friend even more than the imaginary wrong he imputes to us, or a secret the divulging of which—this was what had just happened in my own case—strikes us as even worse than the misunderstanding.

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 our 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.

In the great game of “hide-and-seek” played out in the memory when we are trying to recover a name, there is not a series of graduated approximations. We can see nothing; then, all of a sudden, the exact name appears, and quite different from what we thought we could divine. It is not it that has come to us. No, I believe, rather, that, as we go on through life, we spend our time distancing ourselves from the zone where a name is distinct, and that it was by the exercise of my will and my attention, which enhanced the acuity of my inward gaze, that I had suddenly penetrated the semidarkness and seen clearly. At all events, if there are transitions between forgetfulness and memory, those transitions are unconscious.

He had (like a calculator who means to do nothing else until such time as he has resolved his problem) put down beside him the cigar that, a short while ago, he had had in his mouth, but which he no longer had the necessary freedom of mind to smoke. On remarking the two crouched divinities borne on its arms by the chair set facing, you might've thought the Baron was seeking to solve the riddle of the Sphinx... Now, the figure to which M. de Charlus was applying, and with such intensity, all his mental powers, was that proposed to him by the lineaments of the young Marquis de Surgis' face. It seemed to be, so profound was M. de Charlus' absorption before it, some heraldic motto, some conundrum, some problem in algebra, the riddle or formula of which he was seeking to penetrate.

But these recurrences of desire force us to reflect that, if we wanted to meet these girls again with the same pleasure, we should have also to go back to the year in question, which has since been followed by ten others, in the course of which the girl has faded. We can sometimes find a person again, but not abolish time. All this up until that unforeseen day, sad as a winter’s night, when we are no longer seeking that particular girl, or any other, and when to find one would alarm us even. For we no longer feel we have sufficient attractions to please, or the strength to love. Not, of course, that we are, in the true sense of the word, impotent. So far as love is concerned, we would love more than ever. But we feel that it is too great an undertaking for the little strength that we preserve. Our eternal rest has already introduced intervals, in which we cannot go out, cannot speak.

Are you jealous?” I told Swann that I had never felt jealousy, that I did not even know what it was. “Well, I congratulate you! When you’re a little bit jealous, it’s not altogether unpleasant, from two points of view. For one thing, because it enables people who are not inquisitive to interest themselves in the lives of other people, or at least of one other person. And then because it gives you quite a good sense of the sweetness of possession, of getting into a carriage with a woman, of not letting her go off alone. But that’s only in the very early stages of the disease, or when the cure is almost complete. In between, it’s the most frightful of tortures. Moreover, I have to say that I’ve seldom experienced even the two forms of sweetness I’m referring to; the first by the fault of my nature, which is incapable of any very prolonged reflection; the second because of circumstances, by the fault of the woman, I mean of the women, of whom I’ve been jealous. But that doesn’t matter. Even when you no longer care about things, it still means something that you did so once, because it was always for reasons that escaped other people. We feel that the memory of those feelings is only in us; it’s into ourselves we must return in order to look at it. Don’t make too much fun of the idealist jargon, but what I mean is that I’ve loved life and have loved the arts. Well, now that I’m a bit too tired to live with other people, these old feelings that I’ve had, so personal to myself, seem very precious to me, which is the obsession of every collector.