Other people are, as a rule, so immaterial to us that, when we have entrusted to any one of them the power to cause so much suffering or happiness to ourselves, that person seems at once to belong to a different universe, is surrounded with poetry, makes of our lives a vast expanse, quick with sensation, on which that person and ourselves are ever more or less in contact.

It is often simply from lack of creative imagination that we do not go far enough in suffering.

We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full.

in my cowardice I became at once a man, and did what all we grown men do when face to face with suffering and injustice; I preferred not to see them

His jealousy, like an octopus which throws out a first, then a second, and finally a third tentacle, fastened itself irremovably first to that moment, five o'clock in the afternoon, then to another, then to another again. But Swann was incapable of inventing his sufferings. They were only the memory, the perpetuation of a suffering that had come to him from without.

Love is a trap and only reveals itself to us by making us suffer.

I must choose to cease from suffering or to cease from loving.

The so-called sensitivity of neurotics develops along with their egotism; they cannot bear for other people to flaunt the sufferings with which they are increasingly preoccupied themselves.

I came to recognise that, apart from her [Françoise's] own kinsfolk, the sufferings of humanity inspired in her a pity which increased in direct ratio to the distance separating the sufferers from herself.