Things don't change, but by and by our wishes change.

We become moral when we are unhappy.

If we are to make reality endurable, we must all nourish a fantasy or two.

She poured out Swann's tea, inquired "Lemon or cream?" and, on his answering "Cream, please," said to him with a laugh: "A cloud!" And as he pronounced it excellent, "You see, I know just how you like it." This tea had indeed seemed to Swann, just as it seemed to her; something precious, and love has such a need to find some justification for itself, some guarantee of duration, in pleasures which without it would have no existence and must cease with its passing.

We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full.

So we don't believe that life is beautiful because we don't recall it but if we get a whiff of a long-forgotten smell we are suddenly intoxicated and similarly we think we no longer love the dead because we don't remember them but if by chance we come across an old glove we burst into tears.

The inertia of the mind urges it to slide down the easy slope of imagination, rather than to climb the steep slope of introspection.