As a man with imagination you can enjoy only in regret or in anticipation—that is, in the past or in the future.

As though on a seedling whose blossoms ripen at different times, I had seen in old ladies, on that beach at Balbec, the dried-up seeds and sagging tubers that my girl-friends would become. But, now that it was time for buds to blossom, what did that matter?

Happiness is salutary for the body but sorrow develops the powers of the spirit.

Death is in truth an illness from which we recover.

Time passes, and little by little everything that we have spoken in falsehood becomes true.

We reason, that is, our mind wanders, each time our courage fails to force us to pursue an intuition through all the successive stages which end in its fixation, in the expression of its own reality.

Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself.