Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.

Any mental activity is easy if it need not be subjected to reality.

Griefs, at the moment when they change into ideas, lose some of their power to injure our heart.

Often it is just lack of imagination that keeps a man from suffering very much.

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.

I drank a second mouthful in which I find nothing more than in the first, then a third which gives me rather less than the second. It is time to stop; the potion is losing its magic.

The world was not created once and for all time for each of us individually. There are added to it in the course of our life things of which we have never had any suspicion.