Marcel Proust Quotes
In his younger days a man dreams of possessing the heart of the woman whom he loves; later, the feeling that he possesses the heart of a woman may be enough to make him fall in love with her.
Time passes, and little by little everything that we have spoken in falsehood becomes true.
Just as those who practice the same profession recognize each other instinctively, so do those who practice the same vice.
We are at times too ready to believe that the present is the only possible state of things.
Illness is the doctor to whom we pay most heed; to kindness, to knowledge, we make promise only; pain we obey.
A little insomnia is not without its value in making us appreciate sleep, in throwing a ray of light upon that darkness.
When from a long distant past nothing subsists after the things are broken and scattered, the smell and taste of things remain.
It is not because other people are dead that our affection for them grows faint, it is because we ourselves are dying.
Perfume is that last and best reserve of the past, the one which when all out tears have run dry, can make us cry again!
Our worst fears, like our greatest hopes, are not outside our powers, and we can come in the end to triumph over the former and to achieve the latter.
There comes in all our lives a time ... when the ears can listen to no music save what the moonlight breathes through the flute of silence.
A woman one loves rarely suffices for all our needs, so we deceive her with another whom we do not love.
A work in which there are theories is like an object which still has the ticket that shows its price.
A woman whom we need and who makes us suffer elicits from us a whole gamut of feelings far more profound and vital than a man of genius who interests us.
It is always thus, impelled by a state of mind which is destined not to last, we make our irrevocable decisions
The inertia of the mind urges it to slide down the easy slope of imagination, rather than to climb the steep slope of introspection.
Only by art can we get outside ourselves, instead of seeing only one world, our own, we see it under multiple forms.
An hour or so later he received a note from Odette. Swann had left his cigarette case at her house. "If only," she wrote, "you had also forgotten your heart! I should never have let you have it back.
Habit is a second nature which prevents us from knowing the first, of which it has neither the cruelties nor the enchantments.
Illness is the most heeded of doctors: to goodness and wisdom we only make promises; pain we obey.
To be an artist is to fail, as no other dare to fail... failure is his world and the shrink from it desertion
There's nothing like desire to prevent the things one says from having any resemblance to the things in one's mind.
...a writer's works, like the water in an artesian well, mount to a height which is in proportion to the depth to which suffering has penetrated his soul.
The true voyage of discovery is not a journey to a new place; it is learning to see with new eyes.
The moments of the past do not remain still; they retain in our memory the motion which drew them towards the future, towards a future which has itself become the past, and draw us on in their train.
No exile at the South Pole or on the summit of Mont Blanc separates us more effectively from others than the practice of a hidden vice.
At the heart of our friendly or purely social relations, there lurks a hostility momentarily cured but recurring by fits and starts.
People don't know when they are happy. They're never so unhappy as they think they are.
A cathedral, a wave of a storm, a dancer's leap, never turn out to be as high as we had hoped.
The opinions which we hold of one another, our relations with friends and kinsfolk are in no sense permanent, save in appearance, but are as eternally fluid as the sea itself.
