Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pocket. But I found it would be too long; and the age of t...he great epics is past.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... automatically, worn out by the gloomy day and by the perspective of a sad tomorrow, I put in my mouth a spoonful of tea in whi...ch I had softened a piece of the madeleine.... A delicious pleasure overtook me, isolated, disconnected from any idea about its cause. It immediately made life's vicissitudes indifferent to me, life's disasters became innocuous, its brevity illusory, in the same way that love operates, filling me with a precious essence: or, rather, this essence was not in me, it was me.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It sometimes strikes me that the whole of science is a piece of impudence; that nature can afford to ignore our impertinent interf...erence. If our monkey mischief should ever reach the point of blowing up the earth by decomposing an atom, and even annihilated the sun himself, I cannot really suppose that the universe would turn a hair.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main.... Any man's death diminishes me ...because I am involved in Mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The more I had won that year, the less it meant ... and the more tired and sad I became. And the more I won, the more people wante...d a part of me. I will tell you King's First Law of Recognition: You never get it when you want it, and then when it comes, you get too much.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
On the first days, like a piece of music that one will later be mad about, but that one does not yet distinguish, that which I was... to love so much in [Bergotte's] style was not yet clear to me. I could not put down the novel that I was reading, but I thought that I was only interested in the subject, as in the first moments of love when one goes every day to see a woman at some gathering, or some pastime, by the amusements to which one believes to be attracted.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I noticed occasionally very long troughs which supplied the road with water, and my companion said that three dollars annually wer...e granted by the State to one man in each school-district, who provided and maintained a suitable water-trough by the roadside, for the use of travelers,--a piece of intelligence as refreshing to me as the water itself. That legislature did not sit in vain. It was an Oriental act, which made me wish that I was still farther down East,--another Maine law, which I hope we may get in Massachusetts. That State is banishing bar-rooms from its highways, and conducting the mountain springs thither.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Generally, about all perception, we can say that a sense is what has the power of receiving into itself the sensible forms of thin...gs without the matter, in the way in which a piece of wax takes on the impress of a signet ring without the iron or gold.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »