Even in the most insignificant details of our daily life, none of us can be said to constitute a material whole, which is identical for everyone, and need only be turned up like a page in an account-book or the record of a will; our social personality is created by the thoughts of other people.
Interpretation
Our identity and social self are shaped by the perceptions and thoughts of others, not solely by ourselves.
This quote from Marcel Proust emphasizes the idea that our social identity is not a fixed entity, but rather a composite created through our interactions and the perceptions others hold of us. It suggests that even the smallest details in our daily lives contribute to how we are viewed and understood by society, highlighting the interconnectedness of individual identity and collective thought. Proust invites us to consider how our relationships and social contexts influence our sense of self.
In practice
In a discussion about the importance of feedback in relationships.
But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.
At that time, he was satisfying a sensual curiosity by experiencing the pleasures of people who live for love. He had believed he could stop there, that he would not be obliged to learn their sorrows; how small a thing her charm was for him now compared with the astounding terror that extended out from it like a murky halo, the immense anguish of not knowing at every moment what she had been doing, of not possessing her everywhere and always!
We do not succeed in changing things according to our desire, but gradually our desire changes. The situation that we hoped to change because it was intolerable becomes unimportant. We have not managed to surmount the obstacle, as we were absolutely determined to do, but life has taken us round it, led us past it, and then if we turn round to gaze at the remote past, we can barely catch sight of it, so imperceptible has it become.
A person does not...stand motionless and clear before our eyes with his merits, his defects, his plans, his intentions with regard to ourself exposed on his surface...but is a shadow which we can never succeed in penetrating...a shadow behind which we can alternately imagine, with equal justification, that there burns the flame of hatred and of love.
We are all of us obliged, if we are to make reality endurable, to nurse a few little follies in ourselves.
There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book.
Sadness usually results from one of the following causes either when a man does not succeed, or is ashamed of his success.
My hope is that I may bear witness to the fact that there is a great mystery calling to us all, beckoning across the landscape of our history, promising to realize itself and to give real meaning to what is otherwise only the confusion of our lives and our collective past.
The unvarnished truth is that we have spent the last decade funding the machinery of war, and our children have been sacrificed.
Traditionalists are pessimists about the future and optimists about the past.
There will never cease to be ferment in the world unless people are sure of their food.
The individual is capable of both great compassion and great indifference. He has it within his means to nourish the former and outgrow the latter.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.