We are all of us obliged, if we are to make reality endurable, to nurse a few little follies in ourselves.

Love is space and time measured by the heart.

In a separation it is the one who is not really in love who says the more tender things.

Happiness serves hardly any other purpose than to make unhappiness possible.

An hour or so later he received a note from Odette. Swann had left his cigarette case at her house. "If only," she wrote, "you had also forgotten your heart! I should never have let you have it back.

It is desire that engenders belief and if we fail as a rule to take this into account, it is because most of the desires that create beliefs end only with our own life.

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.