Love is a striking example of how little reality means to us.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that love often transcends reality and our perceptions of it.
Marcel Proust's quote highlights the powerful and often irrational nature of love, asserting that the feelings and experiences associated with love can overshadow the concrete reality that surrounds us. It implies that in matters of the heart, emotional experiences take precedence over logical or factual truths, illustrating how love shapes our perception of reality regardless of objective circumstances.
In practice
Using this quote during a wedding toast to highlight the depth of love over reality.
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.
She grinned at me. 'You got types?' 'Only you darling - lanky brunettes with wicked jaws.
If you are lucky enough to find love, remember it is there and don't throw it away.
Perfect love is the most beautiful of all frustrations because it is more than one can express.
To lose balance sometimes for love is part of living a balanced life.
Once I knew the depth where no hope was and darkness lay on the face of all things. Then love came and set my soul free. Once I fretted and beat myself against the wall that shut me in. My life was without a past or future, and death a consummation devoutly to be wished. But a little word from the fingers of another fell into my hands that clutched at emptiness, and my heart leaped up with the rapture of living. I do not know the meaning of the darkness, but I have learned the overcoming of it.
'It is love and reason,' I said, 'fleeing from all this madness of war.'
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.