"We do not succeed in changing things according to our desire, but gradually our desire changes"
About this Quote
Control is the first illusion Proust punctures. The line begins with a bracing admission of failure: we "do not succeed" at bending the world into the shape of our wanting. That bluntness is doing quiet work. It denies the heroic fantasy - willpower as a lever, desire as a blueprint - and replaces it with a slower, more unsettling truth: the mind adapts in ways the ego rarely notices.
The pivot on "but gradually" is the quote's engine. Proust isn't praising resignation so much as describing a covert physics of feeling. Time, in his universe, is not a backdrop; it's an active solvent. You keep reaching for the same outcome, and without announcing itself, your reaching changes. The subtext is almost evolutionary: we survive disappointment by retooling our appetite, by revising what we can bear to want. Desire becomes a kind of soft diplomacy with reality.
In context, this fits Proust's larger project in In Search of Lost Time: obsession, love, jealousy, social ambition - all the passions that feel like fixed identities - are revealed as unstable, reshaped by habit and memory. The sentence has the chill of self-recognition. It suggests that "moving on" isn't a moral achievement or a clean break; it's the slow rewiring that happens when life refuses to comply. You don't conquer the world. The world trains you, and you call it maturity.
The pivot on "but gradually" is the quote's engine. Proust isn't praising resignation so much as describing a covert physics of feeling. Time, in his universe, is not a backdrop; it's an active solvent. You keep reaching for the same outcome, and without announcing itself, your reaching changes. The subtext is almost evolutionary: we survive disappointment by retooling our appetite, by revising what we can bear to want. Desire becomes a kind of soft diplomacy with reality.
In context, this fits Proust's larger project in In Search of Lost Time: obsession, love, jealousy, social ambition - all the passions that feel like fixed identities - are revealed as unstable, reshaped by habit and memory. The sentence has the chill of self-recognition. It suggests that "moving on" isn't a moral achievement or a clean break; it's the slow rewiring that happens when life refuses to comply. You don't conquer the world. The world trains you, and you call it maturity.
Quote Details
| Topic | Embrace Change |
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