Illuminating Manuscripts

Marcel Proust (1871-1922) - Carnet de notes (Notebooks), 1908-18



"Our passions shape our books; repose writes them in the intervals."

Marcel Proust

"I try to leave out the parts that people skip."

Elmore Leonard

"Easy reading is damn hard writing."

Nathaniel Hawthorne

"The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug."

Mark Twain

"True Ease in Writing comes from Art, not Chance,
As those move easiest who have learn'd to dance."

Alexander Pope

"The two most engaging powers of an author are to be able to make new things familiar and familiar things new."

Samuel Johnson

"The most beautiful things are those that madness prompts and reason writes."

André Gide

"Writing is a way of talking without being interrupted."

Jules Renard

"A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people."

Thomas Mann

"Don't use words too big for the subject. Don't say 'infinitely' when you mean 'very'; otherwise you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite."

C. S. Lewis

La Rocoquette

Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732-1806) - The Swing, 1766

"Fragonard's scenes of frivolity and gallantry are considered the embodiment of the Rococo spirit. A pupil of Chardin and later Boucher, he won the Prix de Rome and from 1756 to 1761 was in Italy, where he developed a particular admiration for Tiepolo and the late Baroque style. In this period he specialized in large historical paintings.

Returning to Paris, he soon changed this style, adopting instead the erotic subjects then in vogue and for which he is chiefly known, of which The Swing is the most famous.

This picture became an immediate success, not merely for its technical excellence, but for the scandal behind it. The young nobleman is not only getting an interesting view up the lady's skirt, but she is being pushed into this position by her priest-lover, shown in the rear.

In this same spirit are some other famous pictures, The See-Saw, Blindman's Bluff, The Stolen Kiss, and The Meeting. After his marriage in 1769, he began painting children and family scenes (usually called genre painting) and even returned to religious subjects. He stopped exhibiting publicly in 1770 and all his later works are commissions from private patrons.

To many, this painting embodies the entire spirit of the ancien regime on the eve of the revolution."

(Boston College Website)

"Pleasure is the object, duty and goal of all rational creatures."

Voltaire

"The essence of pleasure is spontaneity."

Germaine Greer

"Take life too seriously, and what is it worth? If the morning wake us to no new joys, if the evening bring us not the hope of new pleasure, is it worthwhile to dress and undress?"

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"The inward pleasure of imparting pleasure - that is the choicest of all."

Nathaniel Hawthorne

"I do not agree that an age of pleasure is no compensation for a moment of pain."

Thomas Jefferson

"All fits of pleasure are balanced by an equal degree of pain or languor; it is like spending this year part of the next year's revenues."

Jonathan Swift

"The aim of the wise is not to secure pleasure, but to avoid pain."

Aristotle

"Physical pleasure is a sensual experience no different from pure seeing or the pure sensation with which a fine fruit fills the tongue; it is a great unending experience, which is given us, a knowing of the world, the fullness and the glory of all knowing. And it is not our acceptance of it that is bad; the bad thing is that most people misuse and squander this experience and apply it as a stimulant at the tired spots of their lives and as distraction instead of a rallying toward exalted moments."

Rainer Maria Rilke

"I adore simple pleasures. They are the last refuge of the complex."

Oscar Wilde

"Men seldom give pleasure where they are not pleased themselves."

Samuel Johnson