So we don't believe that life is beautiful because we don't recall it but if we get a whiff of a long-forgotten smell we are suddenly intoxicated and similarly we think we no longer love the dead because we don't remember them but if by chance we come across an old glove we burst into tears.
Interpretation
Memories and sensory experiences deeply influence our feelings about life and love.
This quote by Marcel Proust highlights the powerful connection between memories and our emotional responses. It suggests that even fleeting sensory experiences, like a familiar smell or a forgotten object, can evoke strong feelings of nostalgia and love, proving that our past experiences continue to shape our present emotions and perceptions in profound ways.
In practice
During a speech about the impact of memories in our lives, this quote could illustrate the importance of sensory 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.
After all, I believe that legends and myths are largely made of 'truth'.
What early tongue so sweet saluteth me?
Ah, what a sign it is of evil life, Where death's approach is seen so terrible!
We are 6.6 billion people now. We can only feed 4 billion. I don't see 2 billion volunteers to disappear.
The standpoint of the man who relies on religious experience for capturing Reality must always remain individual and incommunicable.
That is how heavy a secret can become. It can make blood flow easier than ink.
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