We believe we can change things according to our wishes because that's the only happy solution we can see. We don't think of what usually happens and what is also a happy solution; things don't change, but by and by our wishes change.
Interpretation
We often believe we can alter reality to match our desires, but true change comes from evolving our wishes over time.
In this quote, Marcel Proust reflects on the relationship between our desires and the changes we experience in life. He suggests that while we may wish for certain changes to occur, the reality is that often our wishes themselves evolve rather than the external circumstances we hope to alter. This highlights the fluid nature of human desires and the way they adapt as we grow and encounter new experiences.
In practice
In a motivational speech about adaptability and personal growth.
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.
I believe at the heart of any revolution for social justice and human dignity are consent and agency, the unequivocal belief that I own my body - not the state, not the church/mosque/temple, not the street and not the family.
Although you may be old or sick, it's not too late to take stock and ask yourself if you really are the person you want to be, and if not, who you do want to be.
Do not fear. Look beyond what's dying to what's being born.
It is only in revolutionary struggle against the capitalists of every country, and only in union with the working women and men of the whole world, that we will achieve a new and brighter future-the socialist brotherhood of the workers.
Sometimes I hear people saying, 'Nothing has changed.' Come and walk in my shoes.
All endings are also beginnings. We just don't know it at the time.
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