Remembrance of Things Past (Marcel Proust)

Quotes from Remembrance of Things Past (Vol 1: Swann’s Way) by Marcel Proust:

• There is no man...however wise, who has not at some period in his youth said things, or lived a life, the memory of which is so unpleasant to him that he would gladly expunge it.
• Nine tenths of the ills from which intelligent people suffer spring from their intellect.
• We are all of us obliged, if we are to make reality endurable, to nurse a few little follies in ourselves.
• Perhaps the immobility of the things that surround us is forced upon them by our conviction that they are themselves, and not anything else, and by the immobility of our conceptions of them.
• ...a writer's works, like the water in an artesian well, mount to a height which is in proportion to the depth to which suffering has penetrated his soul.
• Most of our faculties lie dormant because they can rely upon Habit, which knows what there is to be done and has no need of their services.
• People wish to learn to swim and at the same time to keep one foot on the ground.