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.
When routine bites hard, and ambitions are low. When resentment rides high, but emotion won't grow...and we're changing our ways, taking different roads. Love will tear us apart.
There is a silence, the child of love, which expresses everything, and proclaims more loudly than the tongue is able to do.
The nightingales are sobbing in The orchards of our mothers, And hearts that we broke long ago Have long been breaking others; Tears are round, the sea is deep: Roll them overboard and sleep.
I keep a close watch on this heart of mine I keep my eyes wide open all the time I keep the ends out for the tie that binds Because you're mine, I walk the line.
I gave what other women gave That stepped out of their clothes But when this soul, its body off Naked to naked goes, He it has found shall find therein What none other knows.
We forget some of the oldest medicines we have are love and compassion, and they can be deployed by everyone.
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