The bonds that unite another person to our self exist only in our mind.
Interpretation
The connections we feel with others are ultimately a product of our perception and imagination.
Marcel Proust's quote suggests that the relationships and bonds we perceive with others are not inherently real, but instead occur within our own minds. This perspective invites us to reflect on the subjective nature of our connections, emphasizing that our feelings and perceptions create our personal realities regarding relationships, making it essential to recognize the power of our thoughts in shaping our social experiences.
In practice
In a discussion about the nature of human relationships, you could use this quote to emphasize how our understanding of bonds is subjective.
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.
You can share your testimony in many ways, by the words you speak, by the example you set, by the manner in which you live your life.
If slaughterhouses had glass walls the whole world would be vegetarian.
We are building together a nation in which there are no second-class Australians.
A billion years or so into eternity, how many toys we accumulated during this life will not seem too terribly important.
Any war or conflict you enter where you are likely to lose more Americans and expend more treasure is something worthy of very detailed debate. There ought to be a lot of skepticism. There ought to be a lot of discussion.
If the day comes when you would find me again, give that coin to any man from Braavos, and say these words to him--valar morghulis.
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