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.
Interpretation
People often believe that love is a calculated choice based on specific qualities, rather than a spontaneous feeling.
In this quote, Marcel Proust reflects on the misconception that love is a rational decision made through careful consideration of someone's traits or advantages. He suggests that those who are not in love may think of it as a logical choice, unaware that true love often transcends such deliberations and emerges unexpectedly.
In practice
During a discussion on romantic relationships, one could use this quote to emphasize the unpredictability of love.
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.
And she thought what a clean, simple life she would have led if it weren't for love.
Lust is a poor, weak, whimpering, whispering thing compared with that richness and energy of desire which will arise when lust has been killed.
Love is that splendid triggering of human vitality the supreme activity which nature affords anyone for going out of himself toward someone else.
All love that has not friendship for its base, is like a mansion built upon the sand.
It could all be so simple, but you'd rather make it hard, loving you is like a battle, and we both end up with scars
Trust is our gift back to God, and he finds it so enchanting that Jesus died for love of it
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