The bonds between ourselves and another person exists only in our minds

Memory as it grows fainter loosens them,
And notwithstanding the illusion by which
We want to be duped and which, out of love

Friendship, politeness, deference, duty,
We dupe other people

We exist alone.

Man is the creature who cannot escape from himself
Who knows other people only in himself,
And when he asserts the contrary, he is lying.

We exist alone

We exist alone

Alone

The bonds between ourselves and another person exists only in our minds

We exist alone

But sometimes illumination comes to our rescue
At the very moment when all seems lost
We have knocked at every door
And they open on nothing until, at last
We stumble unconsciously against the only one

The only one

Through which we can enter
The kingdom we have sought in vain a hundred years
And it opens:

I felt myself still reliving a past
Which was no longer anything more
Than the history of another person

In all countries fools outnumber the rest
In all countries fools outnumber the rest

All that we can say is that everything is arranged in this life
As though we entered it carrying the burden of obligations
Contracted in a former life
There is no reason inherent in the conditions of life on this earth
That can make us consider ourselves obliged to do good,
To be fastidious, to be polite even
Nor make the talented artist
Consider himself obliged to begin over again
A score of times a piece of work
The admiration aroused by which will matter little
To his body devoured by worms

Like the patch of yellow wall
Painted with so much knowledge and skill
By an artist who must for ever remain unknown
And is barely identified under the name Vermeer.

All these obligations which have not
Their sanction in our present life
Seem to belong to a different world
Founded upon kindness, scrupulosity,
Self-sacrifice, a world entirely different from this

Which we leave in order to be born into this world,
Before perhaps returning to the other
To live once again beneath the sway of those unknown laws
Which we have obeyed because
We bore their precepts in our hearts,
Knowing not whose hand had traced them there

Those laws to which every profound work
Of the intellect brings us nearer
And which are invisible only — and still! — to fools.

My sole consolation when I went upstairs for the night
Was that Mamma would come in and kiss me after I was in bed.
But this good night lasted for so short a time,
She went down again so soon
That the moment in which I heard her climb the stairs,
And then caught the sound of her garden dress of blue muslin
From which hung little tassels of plaited straw,
Rustling along the double-doored corridor
Was for me a moment of the utmost pain;
For it heralded the moment which was to follow it,
When she would have left me and gone downstairs again.

Love is a striking example of how little reality means to us.

The bonds between ourselves and another person exists only in our minds

Memory as it grows fainter loosens them,
And notwithstanding the illusion by which
We want to be duped and which, out of love

Friendship, politeness, deference, duty,
We dupe other people

We exist alone

We exist alone.

Man is the creature who cannot escape from himself
Who knows other people only in himself,
And when he asserts the contrary, he is lying.

He sat there silent, watching their love expire.