Marcel Proust

"A 'real' person, profoundly as we may sympathise with him, is in a great measure perceptible only through our senses, that is to say, he remains opaque, offers a dead weight which our sensibilities have not the strength to lift."

"When one feels oneself smitten by love for a woman, one ought to say to oneself, “What are her surroundings? What has been her life? All one’s future happiness lies in the answer."

"The opinions which we hold of one another our relations with friends and kinsfolk are in no sense permanent save in appearance but are as eternally fluid as the sea itself."

"But I consoled myself with the reflexion that in spite of everything she was for me the real point of intersection between reality and dream."

"All our final resolutions are made in a state of mind which is not going to last."

"The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes."

"Only imagination and belief can differentiate from the rest certain objects, certain people, and can create an atmosphere."

"We needed germans in Paris to hear Wagner."

"Unkindness is inspired by hatred, anger fuels it into action in which there is no great joy; it would take sadism to turn it into something pleasurable; unkind people imagine themselves to be inflicting pain on someone equally unkind."

"The flowers which played then among the grass, the water which rippled past in the sunshine, the whole landscape which served as environment to their apparition lingers around the memory of them still with its unconscious or unheeding air;..."

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

"Every person is destroyed when we cease to see him; after which his next appearance is a new creation, different from that which immediately preceded it, if not from them all."