Inner Movement

     Music had stirred him like that. Music had troubled him many times. But music was not articulate. It was not a new world, but rather another chaos, that it created in us. Words! Mere words! How terrible they were! How clear and vivid and cruel! One could not escape from them. And yet what a subtile magic there was in them! They seemed to be able to give a plastic form to formless things, and to have a music of their own as sweet as that of viol or of lute. Mere words! Was there anything so real as words?
— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, p. 26.

....Great passions are for the great of soul, and are on a level with them. We think we can have our emotions for nothing. We cannot. Even the finest and most self-sacrificing emotions have to be paid for. Strangely enough that is what makes them fine. The intellectual and emotional life of ordinary people is a very contemptible affair. Just as they borrow their ideas from a sort of circulating library of thought — the Zeitqeist of an age that has no soul and send them back soiled at the end of each week — so they always try to get their emotions on credit, or refuse to pay the bill when it comes in. We must pass out of that conception of life; as soon as we have to pay for an emotion we shall know its quality and be the better for such knowledge. remember that the sentimentalist is always a cynic at heart. Indeed sentimentality is merely the bank-holiday of cynicism. And delightful as cynicism is from its intellectual side, now that it has left the tub for the club, it never can be more than the perfect philosophy for a man who has no soul. It has its social value, and to an artist all modes of expression are interesting, but in itself it is a poor affair, for to the true cynic nothing is ever revealed.
— Oscar Wilde, De Profundis (Epistola: in Carcere et Vinculis) [Letter to Lord Alfred Douglas], p. 135.

We hear in retrospect when we have understood.
— Marcel Proust, La Prisonniére (2 vols.), 2, 187, in The Maxims of Marcel Proust, Justin O'Brien (ed. & tr.), p. 5.

The one thing more difficult than following a regime is keeping from imposing it on others.
— Marcel Proust, Sodome et Gomorrhe: II (3 vols.), 3, p. 191, in Ibid., p. 15.

We have only amorphous, fragmentary visions of the universe, which we fill out by means of arbitrary associations of ideas that create dangerous suggestions.
— Marcel Proust, Albertine disparue (2 vols.), 2, p. 33, in Ibid., p. 24.

The universe is true for all of us and different for each of us.
— Marcel Proust, Du coté de chez Swann (2 vols.), 1, p. 260, in Ibid., p. 68.

For every malady that doctors cure with medicine, they produce ten in healthy people by inoculating them with that virus which is a thousand times more powerful than any microbe: the idea that one is ill.
— Marcel Proust, Le Temps retrouvé (2 vols.), 2, p. 270, in Ibid., p. 126.