On days when the sun refuses to shine

Photography and collage by me.

I recently listened to an audiobook by Alain de Botton called How Proust can change your Life. This clever man has brilliantly distilled Proust for those of us not ready to wade though the 7 volumes and millions of words in In Search of Lost Time. Proust has a great many insights into human nature and how to live. Botton's audiobook has inspired me to one day delve into Proust first hand. For now, let me share with you a few quotes by Proust that I found helpful on days when the sun refuses to shine.

"Happiness is good for the body, but it is grief which develops the strengths of the mind."

"We cannot be taught wisdom, we have to discover it for ourselves by a journey which no one can undertake for us, an effort which no one can spare us."

"The moral: to recognize that our best chance at contentment is by taking up the wisdom offered to us in coded form through our coughs, allergies, social gaffes and emotional betrayals, and to avoid the ingratitude of those who blame the peas, the bores and the weather."

"The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes."