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Pleasures and Days QUOTES

Pleasures and Days QUOTES

1 " Es mejor soñar una vida que vivirla, aunque vivirla siga siendo soñarla, pero menos misteriosamente y con menos claridad a la vez, con un sueño oscuro y pesado, similar al sueño disperso en la débil conciencia de los animales que rumian. "

― Marcel Proust , Pleasures and Days

2 " آموخت که آدم به غیبت عادت می­کند و این عادت به نبودن عزیزان از نبودنشان ناگوارتر است. "

― Marcel Proust , Pleasures and Days

3 " You won’t manage, you’ll forget me; but if after a year, alas, more perhaps, a sad text, a death, or a rainy evening reminds you of me, you can offer me some altruism! I will never, never be able see you again . . . except in my soul, and this would require that we think about each other simultaneously. I’ll think about you forever so that my soul remains open to you endlessly in case you feel like entering it. But the visitor will keep me waiting for a long time! The November rains will have rotted the flowers on my grave, June will have burned them, and my soul will always be weeping impatiently. Ah! I hope that someday the sight of a keepsake, the recurrence of a birthday, the bent of your thoughts will guide your memory within the circle of my tenderness. It will then be as if I’ve heard you, perceived you, a magic spell will cover everything with flowers for your arrival. Think about the dead man. But, alas! Can I hope that death and your gravity will accomplish what life with its ardors, and our tears, and our merry times, and our lips were unable to achieve? "

― Marcel Proust , Pleasures and Days

4 " No sooner does an approaching hour become the present for us than it sheds all its charms, only to regain them, it is true, on the roads of memory, when we have left that hour far behind us, and so long as our soul is vast enough to disclose deep perspectives. "

― Marcel Proust , Pleasures and Days

5 " Las lluvias de noviembre habrán corrompido las flores de mi tumba, las habrá quemado junio y mi alma seguirá llorando siempre de impaciencia. "

― Marcel Proust , Pleasures and Days

6 " The voice of the soul and of the imagination is the only voice that makes the soul and the imagination resonate thoroughly and happily; and had you spent a bit of the time you have killed to please others and had you made that bit come alive, had you nourished it by reading and reflecting at your hearth during winter and in your park during summer, you would be nurturing the rich memory of deeper and fuller hours. Have the courage to take up the rake and the pickax. Someday you will delight in smelling a sweet fragrance drifting up from your memory as if from a gardener’s brimming wheelbarrow. "

― Marcel Proust , Pleasures and Days

7 " As a man with imagination you can enjoy only in regret or in anticipation—that is, in the past or in the future. "

― Marcel Proust , Pleasures and Days

8 " Para estar al borde del mar no hay más que cerrar los ojos. "

― Marcel Proust , Pleasures and Days

9 " Life is a hard thing that presses us too tightly, forever hurting our souls. Upon feeling those restraints loosen for a moment, one can experience clear-sighted pleasures. "

― Marcel Proust , Pleasures and Days

10 " Alexis had entered that ardent period in which the body labors so robustly at raising its palaces between the flesh and the soul that the soul quickly seems to have vanished, until the day when illness or sorrow has slowly undermined the barriers and transcended the painful fissure, allowing the soul to reappear. "

― Marcel Proust , Pleasures and Days

11 " Later on, absence taught me far more bitter lessons: that you get accustomed to absence, that the greatest abatement of the self, the most humiliating torment is to feel that you are no longer tormented by absence. "

― Marcel Proust , Pleasures and Days

12 " A fashionable milieu is one in which each person’s opinion is made up of everyone else’s opinions. Does each opinion run counter to everyone else’s? Then it is a literary milieu. "

― Marcel Proust , Pleasures and Days

13 " Now, in one of those utterly physical moments, when the soul takes a backseat to the digesting stomach, the skin enjoying a recent ablution and some fine linen, the mouth smoking, the eyes reveling in bare shoulders and bright lights, he repeated his prayer more indolently, doubting a miracle that would upset the psychological law of his fickleness, which was as impossible to flout as the physical laws of weight or death. "

― Marcel Proust , Pleasures and Days

14 " However, since I’m jealous only of pleasure, since it’s my body that’s jealous, since what I’m jealous of is not her heart, not her happiness, which I wish for her to find with the person most capable of making her happy; when my body fades away, when my soul gets the better of my flesh, when I am gradually detached from material things as on a past evening when I was very ill, when I no longer wildly desire the body and when I love the soul all the more—at that point I will no longer be jealous. Then I will truly love. "

― Marcel Proust , Pleasures and Days

15 " Sin embargo, he pintado con ternura los brazos de vuestras arañas, que han acariciado con una melancolía amorosa tantas cosas y tantos seres y ahora se han apagado para siempre. "

― Marcel Proust , Pleasures and Days

16 " Like so many of his sitters, you had to die an early death, and in your eyes as in theirs, one could see the gloom of forebodings alternating with the soft light of resignation. "

― Marcel Proust , Pleasures and Days

17 " We accept so many commitments in regard to life that a time comes when, despairing of ever managing to fulfill them all, we face the graves, we call upon death, “death, which brings help to destinies that have trouble coming true.” But while death may exempt us from commitments we have made in regard to life, it cannot exempt us from our commitments to ourselves, especially the most important one: namely, the commitment to live in order to be worthy and deserving. "

― Marcel Proust , Pleasures and Days

18 " May my life someday be so limpid that the Muses will deign to mirror themselves in it and that we can see the reflections of their smiles and their dances skimming across its surface. "

― Marcel Proust , Pleasures and Days

19 " More than anything else the viscount’s sad, sweet gaze made the boy feel like crying. Alexis knew that those eyes had always been sad and, even in the happiest moments, they seemed to implore a consolation for sufferings that he did not appear to experience. But at this moment Alexis believed that his uncle’s sadness, courageously banished from his conversation, had taken refuge in his eyes, which, along with his sunken cheeks, were the only sincere things about his entire person. "

― Marcel Proust , Pleasures and Days

20 " With ardent sadness he contemplated the scene of his death for a long time, endlessly revising it like a work of art and surrounding it with images of this world, images that still imbued his thoughts, but that, already slipping away from him in his gradual departure, became vague and beautiful. "

― Marcel Proust , Pleasures and Days