There is not a woman in the world the possession of whom is as precious as that of the truths which she reveals to us by causing us to suffer.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the value of the insights gained from suffering through relationships with women.
In this quote, Marcel Proust reflects on the deep and often painful revelations that can arise from our connections with women. He suggests that the truths we uncover through such experiences, even when they involve suffering, hold immense value and are more precious than possession itself, highlighting the complexity of love and emotional growth.
In practice
During a discussion on love, one might use this quote to illustrate the depth of emotional experiences.
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.
Nothing is more incumbent on the old than to know when they should get out of the way and relinquish to younger successors the honors they can no longer earn, and the duties they can no longer perform.
Hope is not optimism, which expects things to turn out well, but something rooted in the conviction that there is good worth working for.
I never understood that line. The point was to inhale. That was the point.
Everything comes to us that belongs to us if we create the capacity to receive it.
There is nothing Madison Avenue can give us that will make us more beautiful women. We are beautiful because God created us that way.
Most things don't work out as expected, but what happens instead often turns out to be the good stuff.
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