Latest Quotes

“Thus it is that most of our attempts to translate our innermost feelings do no more than relieve us of them by drawing them out in a blurred form which does not help us to identify them.”

— Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Volume I: Swann's Way (A Modern Library E-Book)

“The belief that a person has a share in an unknown life to which his or her love may win us admission is, of all the prerequisites of love, the one which it values most highly and which makes it set little store by all the rest.”

— Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Volume I: Swann's Way

“Pleasure in this respect is like photography. What we take, in the presence of the beloved object, is merely a negative, which we develop later, when we are back at home, and have once again found at our disposal that inner dark-room the entrance to which is barred to us so long as we are with other…”

— Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Volume II: Within a Budding Grove

“Life would have seemed an exquisite thing to me if only I had been free to spend it, hour after hour, with her, to go with her to the stream, to the cow, to the train, to be always at her side, to feel that I was known to her, had my place in her thoughts.”

— Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Volume II: Within a Budding Grove

“Perhaps only if one spins momentarily out of control, or grows feathers, or begins to write a sonnet can one be said to have seen the beauty of another person.”

— Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just

“Matisse never hoped to save lives. But he repeatedly said that he wanted to make paintings so serenely beautiful that when one came upon them, suddenly all problems would subside.”

— Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just

“The beautiful person or thing incites in us the longing for truth because it provides by its compelling an introduction to the state of certainty yet does not itself satiate our desire for certainty since beauty, sooner or later, brings us into contact with our own capacity for making errors.”

— Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just

“It is not that a poem or a painting or a palm tree or a person is ‘true,’ but rather that it ignites the desire for truth in us. It gives us an electric brightness, which leaves us prepared to undergo a giant labor.”

— Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just

“Something beautiful fills the mind yet invites the search for something beyond itself, something larger or something of the same scale with which it needs to be brought into relation.”

— Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just

“Beauty makes the world new.”

— Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just

“I look at you and a sense of wonder takes me.”

— Homer, The Odyssey

“Leonardo drew a cartoon of St. Anne and for 'two days a crowd of people of all qualities passed in naive excitement through the chamber where it hung.'”

— Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just

“Beauty brings copies of itself into being. It makes us draw it, take photographs of it, or describe it to other people. Sometimes it gives rise to exact replication and other times to resemblances and still other times to things whose connection to the original site of inspiration is unrecognizable.”

— Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just

“We know that in his work Proust did not describe a life as it actually was, but a life as it was remembered by the one who had lived it. And yet even this statement is imprecise and far too crude. For the important thing for the remembering author is not what he experienced, but the weaving of his m…”

— Walter Benjamin, Illuminations

“The Latin word textum means 'web.'”

— Walter Benjamin, Illuminations

“The azure of the vast, vaulted sky.”

— Charles Baudelaire, Illuminations

“Music resonates in so many parts of the brain that we can’t conceive of it being an isolated thing. It’s whom you were with, how old you were, and what was happening that day.”

— David Byrne, How Music Works

“Young girls and young men, in all their light-hearted innocence, carried the kind, sweet fruit away in their woven baskets, and in their midst a youth with a singing lyre played charmingly upon it for them, and sang the beautiful song for Linos in a light voice, and they followed him, and with singi…”

— Homer, The Iliad

“I believe in more publishing, not less. The more tools for creations and dissemination, the better. I believe that culture is like democracy, that for all the problems of letting any old idiot vote, it’s better than not letting particular people vote because you don’t think they’re voting the right…”

— Richard Nash, And we oiled each other up and ran naked in the dust of Sparta.

“Why should we sacrifice sincerity to politeness?”

— Mary Hays, The Idea of Being Free