Life & Wisdom Quote by Marcel Proust

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.