Knossos, Greece - 2006
1. “A cathedral, a wave of storm, a dancer's leap, never turn out to be as high as we had hoped.”
2. "A change in the weather is sufficient to recreate the world and ourselves."
3. "A powerful idea communicates some of its strength to him who challenges it."
4. “A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left.”
5. “Every kiss provokes another. Ah, in those earliest days of love how naturally the kisses spring into life. How closely, in their abundance, are they pressed one against another; until lovers would find it as hard to count the kisses eexchanged in an hour, as to count the flowers in a meadow in May.”
6. “Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.”
7. "Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and composed our masterpieces."
8. "For a long time I used to go to bed early. Sometimes, when I had put out my candle, my eyes would close so quickly that I had not even time to say to myself:"I'm falling asleep. And half an hour later the thought that it was time to go to sleep would awaken me; I would make as if to put away the book which I imagined was still in my hands, and to blow out the light; I had gone on thinking, while I was asleep, about what I had just been reading, but these thoughts had taken rather peculiar turn; it seemed to me that I myself was the immediate subject of my book: a church, a quartet, the rivalry between François I and Charles V."
9. “Happiness serves hardly any other purpose than to make unhappiness possible.”
10. “If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time.”
11. "Impelled by a state of mind which is destined not to last, we make our irrevocable decisions"
12. "In a separation it is the one who is not really in loved who says the more tender things."
13. “In his younger days a man dreams of possessing the heart of the woman whom he loves; later, the feeling that he possesses the heart of a woman may be enough to make him fall in love with her.”
14. ”In theory one is aware that the earth revolves, but in practice one does not perceive it, the ground upon which one treads seems not to move, and one can live undisturbed. So it is with Time in one's life.”
15. “I perceived that to express those impressions, to write that essential book, which is the only true one, a great writer does not, in the current meaning of the word, invent it, but, since it exists already in each one of us, interprets it. The duty and the task of a writer are those of an interpreter.”
16. "It is always during a passing state of mind that we make lasting resolutions."
17. "It is comforting when one has a sorrow to lie in the warmth of one's bed and there, abandoning all effort and all resistance, to bury even one's head under the cover, giving one's self up to it completely, moaning like branches in the autumn wind. But there is still a better bed, full of divine odors. It is our sweet, our profound, our impenetrable friendship."
18. "It seems that the taste for books grows with intelligence, a little below it but on the same stem, as every passion is accomplished by a predilection for that which surrounds its object, which has an affinity for it, which in its absence still speaks of it. So, the great writers, during those hours when they are not in direct communication with their thought, delight in the society of books. Besides, is it not chiefly for them that they have been written; do they not disclose to them a thousand beauties, which remain hidden to the masses?"
19. “Let us be grateful to people who make us happy, they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.”
20. "Lies are essential to humanity. They are perhaps as important as the pursuit of pleasure and moreover are dictated by that pursuit."
21. "Life is extraordinarily suave and sweet with certain natural, witty, affectionate people who have unusual distinction and are capable of every vice, but who make a display of none in public and about whom no one can affirm they have a single one. There is something supple and secret about them. Besides, their perversity gives spice to their most innocent occupations, such as taking a walk in the garden at night."
22. “Like everybody who is not in love, he thought one chose the person to be loved after endless deliberations and on the basis of particular qualities or advantages.”
23. "Love is space and time measured by the heart."
24. “No exile at the South Pole or on the summit of Mont Blanc separates us more effectively from others than the practice of a hidden vice.”
25. “Often it is just lack of imagination that keeps a man from suffering very much.”
26. “One becomes moral as soon as one is unhappy.”
27. "Our intellect is not the most subtle, the most powerful, the most appropriate, instrument for revealing the truth. It is life that, little by little, example by example, permits us to see that what is most important to our heart, or to our mind, is learned not by reasoning but through other agencies. Then it is that the intellect, observing their superiority, abdicates its control to them upon reasoned grounds and agrees to become their collaborator and lackey."
28. “Our memory is like a shop in the window of which is exposed now one, now another photograph of the same person. And as a rule the most recent exhibit remains for some time the only one to be seen.”
29. “Our passions shape our books; repose writes them in the intervals.”
30. "People have many different kinds of pleasure. The real one is that for which they will forsake the others."
31. "People who are not in love fail to understand how an intelligent man can suffer because of a very ordinary woman. This is like being surprised that anyone should be stricken with cholera because of a creature so insignificant as the comma bacillus."
32. "That translucent alabaster of our memories."
33. "The bonds that unite another person to our self exist only in our mind."
34. "The book is chaotic, ill constructed, it has and will have no external shape; and yet it hangs together because it is stitched internally, because it contains rhythm."
35. “The countries which we long for occupy, at any given moment, a far larger place in our actual life than the country in which we happen to be.”
36. "The features of our face are hardly more than gestures which force of habit made permanent. Nature, like the destruction of Pompeii, like the metamorphosis of a nymph into a tree, has arrested us in an accustomed movement."
37. "The human plagiarism which is most difficult to avoid, for individuals... is the plagiarism of ourselves."
38. "The moments of the past do not remain still; they retain in our memory the motion which drew them towards the future, towards a future which has itself become the past, and draw us on in their train."
39. "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."
40. "The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes."
41. "The regularity of a habit is generally in proportion to its absurdity."
42. “There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book.”
43. “There is no man, however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived in a way the consciousness of which is so unpleasant to him in later life that he would gladly, if he could, expunge it from his memory.”
44. ‘There's nothing like desire to prevent the things one says from having any resemblance to the things in one's mind.”
45. “The true paradises are the lost paradises.”
46. “They buried him, but all through the night of mourning, in the lighted windows, his books arranged three by three kept watch like angels with outspread wings and seemed, for him who was no more, the symbol of his resurrection.”
47. "Things don't change, but by and by our wishes change."
48. "Time passes, and little by little everything that we have spoken in falsehood becomes true."
49. “Time, which changes people, does not alter the image we have retained of them.”
50. "We are able to find everything in our memory, which is like a dispensary or chemical laboratory in which chance steers our hand sometimes to a soothing drug and sometimes to a dangerous poison."
51. “We are at times too ready to believe that the present is the only possible state of things.”
52. “We are healed from suffering only by experiencing it to the full.”
53. “'We aren't getting anywhere. You know that as well as I do.' `One doesn't have to get anywhere in a marriage. It's not a public conveyance.'”
54. “We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.”
55. "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 around it, led us past it, and then if we turn around to gaze at the remote past, we can barely catch sight of it, so imperceptible has it become."
56. “We say that the hour of death cannot be forecast, but when we say this we imagine that hour as placed in an obscure and distant future. It never occurs to us that it has any connection with the day already begun or that death could arrive this same afternoon, this afternoon which is so certain and which has every hour filled in advance.”
57. "What a profound significance small things assume when the woman we love conceals them from us."
1. “A cathedral, a wave of storm, a dancer's leap, never turn out to be as high as we had hoped.”
2. "A change in the weather is sufficient to recreate the world and ourselves."
3. "A powerful idea communicates some of its strength to him who challenges it."
4. “A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left.”
5. “Every kiss provokes another. Ah, in those earliest days of love how naturally the kisses spring into life. How closely, in their abundance, are they pressed one against another; until lovers would find it as hard to count the kisses eexchanged in an hour, as to count the flowers in a meadow in May.”
6. “Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.”
7. "Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and composed our masterpieces."
8. "For a long time I used to go to bed early. Sometimes, when I had put out my candle, my eyes would close so quickly that I had not even time to say to myself:"I'm falling asleep. And half an hour later the thought that it was time to go to sleep would awaken me; I would make as if to put away the book which I imagined was still in my hands, and to blow out the light; I had gone on thinking, while I was asleep, about what I had just been reading, but these thoughts had taken rather peculiar turn; it seemed to me that I myself was the immediate subject of my book: a church, a quartet, the rivalry between François I and Charles V."
9. “Happiness serves hardly any other purpose than to make unhappiness possible.”
10. “If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time.”
11. "Impelled by a state of mind which is destined not to last, we make our irrevocable decisions"
12. "In a separation it is the one who is not really in loved who says the more tender things."
13. “In his younger days a man dreams of possessing the heart of the woman whom he loves; later, the feeling that he possesses the heart of a woman may be enough to make him fall in love with her.”
14. ”In theory one is aware that the earth revolves, but in practice one does not perceive it, the ground upon which one treads seems not to move, and one can live undisturbed. So it is with Time in one's life.”
15. “I perceived that to express those impressions, to write that essential book, which is the only true one, a great writer does not, in the current meaning of the word, invent it, but, since it exists already in each one of us, interprets it. The duty and the task of a writer are those of an interpreter.”
16. "It is always during a passing state of mind that we make lasting resolutions."
17. "It is comforting when one has a sorrow to lie in the warmth of one's bed and there, abandoning all effort and all resistance, to bury even one's head under the cover, giving one's self up to it completely, moaning like branches in the autumn wind. But there is still a better bed, full of divine odors. It is our sweet, our profound, our impenetrable friendship."
18. "It seems that the taste for books grows with intelligence, a little below it but on the same stem, as every passion is accomplished by a predilection for that which surrounds its object, which has an affinity for it, which in its absence still speaks of it. So, the great writers, during those hours when they are not in direct communication with their thought, delight in the society of books. Besides, is it not chiefly for them that they have been written; do they not disclose to them a thousand beauties, which remain hidden to the masses?"
19. “Let us be grateful to people who make us happy, they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.”
20. "Lies are essential to humanity. They are perhaps as important as the pursuit of pleasure and moreover are dictated by that pursuit."
21. "Life is extraordinarily suave and sweet with certain natural, witty, affectionate people who have unusual distinction and are capable of every vice, but who make a display of none in public and about whom no one can affirm they have a single one. There is something supple and secret about them. Besides, their perversity gives spice to their most innocent occupations, such as taking a walk in the garden at night."
22. “Like everybody who is not in love, he thought one chose the person to be loved after endless deliberations and on the basis of particular qualities or advantages.”
23. "Love is space and time measured by the heart."
24. “No exile at the South Pole or on the summit of Mont Blanc separates us more effectively from others than the practice of a hidden vice.”
25. “Often it is just lack of imagination that keeps a man from suffering very much.”
26. “One becomes moral as soon as one is unhappy.”
27. "Our intellect is not the most subtle, the most powerful, the most appropriate, instrument for revealing the truth. It is life that, little by little, example by example, permits us to see that what is most important to our heart, or to our mind, is learned not by reasoning but through other agencies. Then it is that the intellect, observing their superiority, abdicates its control to them upon reasoned grounds and agrees to become their collaborator and lackey."
28. “Our memory is like a shop in the window of which is exposed now one, now another photograph of the same person. And as a rule the most recent exhibit remains for some time the only one to be seen.”
29. “Our passions shape our books; repose writes them in the intervals.”
30. "People have many different kinds of pleasure. The real one is that for which they will forsake the others."
31. "People who are not in love fail to understand how an intelligent man can suffer because of a very ordinary woman. This is like being surprised that anyone should be stricken with cholera because of a creature so insignificant as the comma bacillus."
32. "That translucent alabaster of our memories."
33. "The bonds that unite another person to our self exist only in our mind."
34. "The book is chaotic, ill constructed, it has and will have no external shape; and yet it hangs together because it is stitched internally, because it contains rhythm."
35. “The countries which we long for occupy, at any given moment, a far larger place in our actual life than the country in which we happen to be.”
36. "The features of our face are hardly more than gestures which force of habit made permanent. Nature, like the destruction of Pompeii, like the metamorphosis of a nymph into a tree, has arrested us in an accustomed movement."
37. "The human plagiarism which is most difficult to avoid, for individuals... is the plagiarism of ourselves."
38. "The moments of the past do not remain still; they retain in our memory the motion which drew them towards the future, towards a future which has itself become the past, and draw us on in their train."
39. "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."
40. "The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes."
41. "The regularity of a habit is generally in proportion to its absurdity."
42. “There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book.”
43. “There is no man, however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived in a way the consciousness of which is so unpleasant to him in later life that he would gladly, if he could, expunge it from his memory.”
44. ‘There's nothing like desire to prevent the things one says from having any resemblance to the things in one's mind.”
45. “The true paradises are the lost paradises.”
46. “They buried him, but all through the night of mourning, in the lighted windows, his books arranged three by three kept watch like angels with outspread wings and seemed, for him who was no more, the symbol of his resurrection.”
47. "Things don't change, but by and by our wishes change."
48. "Time passes, and little by little everything that we have spoken in falsehood becomes true."
49. “Time, which changes people, does not alter the image we have retained of them.”
50. "We are able to find everything in our memory, which is like a dispensary or chemical laboratory in which chance steers our hand sometimes to a soothing drug and sometimes to a dangerous poison."
51. “We are at times too ready to believe that the present is the only possible state of things.”
52. “We are healed from suffering only by experiencing it to the full.”
53. “'We aren't getting anywhere. You know that as well as I do.' `One doesn't have to get anywhere in a marriage. It's not a public conveyance.'”
54. “We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.”
55. "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 around it, led us past it, and then if we turn around to gaze at the remote past, we can barely catch sight of it, so imperceptible has it become."
56. “We say that the hour of death cannot be forecast, but when we say this we imagine that hour as placed in an obscure and distant future. It never occurs to us that it has any connection with the day already begun or that death could arrive this same afternoon, this afternoon which is so certain and which has every hour filled in advance.”
57. "What a profound significance small things assume when the woman we love conceals them from us."
