The inertia of the mind urges it to slide down the easy slope of imagination, rather than to climb the steep slope of introspection. - Marcel Proust

With intelligent people, three-quarters of the things they suffer from come from their intelligence.

... it was with an unusual intensity of pleasure, a pleasure destined to have a lasting effect upon his character and conduct...

In reality, every reader, while he is reading, is the reader of his own self. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument, which he offers to the reader to permit him to discern what, without the book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself. The reader’s recognition in his own self of what the book says is the proof of its truth.