The fixity of a habit is generally in direct proportion to its absurdity.

For, just as in the beginning it is formed by desire, so afterwards love is kept in existence only by painful anxiety.

The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it...

The paradoxes of today are the prejudices of tomorrow, since the most benighted and the most deplorable prejudices have had their moment of novelty when fashion lent them its fragile grace.

A sleeping man holds in a circle around him the thread of the hours, the order of years and of worlds. He consults them instinctively upon awaking and in one second reads in them the point of the earth that he occupies, the time past until his arousal; but their ranks can be mingled or broken.

We pack the physical outline of the creature we see with all the ideas we have already formed about him, and in the complete picture of him we compose in our minds those ideas have certainly the principal place.

Wars are fought for the benefit of oligarchs, triumphs bought with the blood of peons.