We exist only by virtue of ...

We exist only by virtue of what we possess, we possess only what is really present to us, and many of our memories, our moods, our ideas sail away on a voyage of their own until they are lost to sight! Then we can no longer take them into account in the total which is our personality. But they know of secret paths by which to return to us.
We exist only by virtue of what we possess, we possess only what is really present to us, and many of our memories, our moods, our ideas sail away on a voyage of their own until they are lost to sight! Then we can no longer take them into account in the total which is our personality. But they know of secret paths by which to return to us.
 Marcel Proust

Quotes from the same author

We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.
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 Marcel Proust
Let us be grateful to people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.
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 Marcel Proust
The truth is that men can have several sorts of pleasure. The true pleasure is the one for which they abandon the other.
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 Marcel Proust
For everyone who, having no artistic sense-that is to say, no submission to subjective reality-may have the knack of reasoning about art till doomsday, especially if he be, in addition, a diplomat or financier in contact with the 'realities' of the present day, is only too ready to believe literature is an intellectual game which is destined to gradually be abandoned as time goes on.
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 Marcel Proust
We are able to find everything in our memory, which is like a dispensary or chemical laboratory in which chance steers our hand sometimes to a soothing drug and sometimes to a dangerous poison.
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 Marcel Proust