If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that instead of limiting our dreams due to fear, we should embrace and amplify our dreams.
Marcel Proust emphasizes the importance of dreaming and imagination as vital components of a fulfilling life. He argues that the dangers associated with dreaming should not lead us to suppress our aspirations; rather, we should engage with our dreams fully and continually. By dreaming more, we can explore the depths of our creativity and desires, ultimately enriching our lives rather than shrinking away from potential disappointments.
In practice
This quote could be used in a motivational speech to inspire creativity among students.
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.
We simply attempt to be fearful when others are greedy and to be greedy only when others are fearful.
...one of the traits of genius is not to drag its thought through the rut worn by vulgar minds.
Some people are under the impression that all that is required to make a good fisherman is the ability to tell lies easily and without blushing; but this is a mistake. Mere bald fabrication is useless; the veriest tyro can manage that. It is in the circumstantial detail, the embellishing touches of probability, the general air of scrupulous - almost of pedantic - veracity, that the experienced angler is seen.
When God's hand is on thy back, let thy hand be on thy mouth, for though the affliction be sharp it shall be but short.
People will never know how hard it is to get information, especially if it's locked up behind official doors where, if politicians had their way, they'd stamp 'top secret' on the color of the walls.
Be led by your talent, not by your self-loathing; those other things you just have to manage.
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