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Book: How Proust Can Change Your Life
Quotes of Book: How Proust Can Change Your
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  1. Alain de Botton _ How Proust Can Change Your

    Every writer is obliged to create his own language, as every violinist is obliged to create his own "tone"…. I don't mean to say that I like original writers who write badly. I prefer-and perhaps it's a weakness-those who write well. But they begin to write well only on condition that they're original, that they create their own language. Correctness, perfection of style do exist, but on the other side of originality, after having gone through all the faults, not this side. Correctness this side-"discreet emotion," "smiling good nature," "most abominable of all years"-doesn't exist. The only way to defend language is to attack it, yes, yes, Madame Straus!
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  2. Alain de Botton _ How Proust Can Change Your

    It was a symbol of what Ruskin had done for Proust, and what all books might do for their readers, namely bring back to life, from the deadness caused by habit and inattention, valuable yet neglected aspects of experience.
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  3. Alain de Botton _ How Proust Can Change Your

    Wanting to sound like other people has its temptations. There are inherited habits of speech guaranteed to make us sound authoritative, intelligent, worldly, appropriately grateful, or deeply moved.
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  4. Alain de Botton _ How Proust Can Change Your

    Why is this painful journey so indispensable to the acquisition of true wisdom?…It is as if the mind were a squeamish organ that refused to entertain difficult truths unless encouraged to do so by difficult events. "Happiness is good for the body," Proust tells us, "but it is grief which develops the strengths of the mind." These griefs put us through a form of mental gymnastics which we would have avoided in happier times. Indeed, if a genuine priority is the development of our mental capacities, the implication is that we would be better off being unhappy than content, better off pursuing tormented love affairs than reading Plato or Spinoza. {Proust writes} A woman whom we need and who makes us suffer elicits from us a whole gamut of feelings far more profound and more vital than does a man of genius who interests us.
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  5. Alain de Botton _ How Proust Can Change Your

    For Proust, an injection of jealousy is the only thing capable of rescuing a relationship ruined by habit.
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  6. Alain de Botton _ How Proust Can Change Your

    At the end of seven hundred and twelve pages of this manuscript,' he had reported, 'after innumerable griefs at being drowned in unfathomable developments and irritating impatience at never being able to rise to the surface – one doesn't have a single, but not a single clue of what this is about. What is the point of all this? What does it all mean? Where is it all leading? Impossible to know anything about it!
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  7. Alain de Botton _ How Proust Can Change Your

    To make it into a discipline is to give too large a role to what is only an incitement. Reading is on the threshold of the spiritual life; it can introduce us to it: it does not constitute it.
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  8. Alain de Botton _ How Proust Can Change Your

    There are few things humans are more dedicated to than unhappiness. Had we been placed on earth by a malign creator for the exclusive purpose of suffering, we would have good reason to congratulate ourselves on our enthusiastic response to the task. Reasons to be inconsolable abound: the frailty of our bodies, the fickleness of love, the insincerities of social life, the compromises of friendship, the deadening effects of habit. In the face of such persistent ills, we might naturally expect that no event would be awaited with greater anticipation than the moment of our own extinction. Someone
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  9. Alain de Botton _ How Proust Can Change Your

    The whole art of living is to make use of the individuals through whom we suffer.
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  10. Alain de Botton _ How Proust Can Change Your

    The incident emphasizes once more that beauty is something to be found, rather than passively encountered, that it requires us to pick up on certain details, to identify the whiteness of a cotton dress, the reflection of the sea on the hull of a yacht, or the contrast between the color of a jockey's coat and his face.
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  11. Alain de Botton _ How Proust Can Change Your

    The value of a novel is not limited to its depiction of emotions and people akin to those in our own life; it stretches to an ability to describe these far better than we would have been able, to put a finger on perceptions that we recognize as our own, but could not have formulated on our own.
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  12. Alain de Botton _ How Proust Can Change Your

    Our best chance of contentment lies in taking up the wisdom offered to us in coded form through our coughs, allergies, social gaffes, and emotional betrayals, and avoid the ingratitude of those who blame the peas, the bores, the time, and the weather.
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