Marcel Proust Quotes

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.

A language which we do not know is a fortress sealed.

We must love men more than things, and I admire and weep more for the soldiers than for the churches which were only the recording of an heroic gesture which today is reenacted at every moment.

Often it is just lack of imagination that keeps a man from suffering very much.

After a certain age, the more one becomes oneself, the more obvious one's family traits become.

The duty and the task of a writer are those of an interpreter.

The most familiar precepts are not always the truest.

I wished to see storms only on those coasts where they raged with most violence.

with one image he would make that beauty explode into me.

Truth is a point of view about things.

When I am not too sad to listen, music is my consolation.

Our intonations contain our philosophy of life, what each of us is constantly telling himself about things.

The artist who gives up an hour of work for an hour of conversation with a friend knows that he is sacrificing a reality for something that does not exist.

No man is a complete mystery except to himself.

The highest praise of God consists in the denial of him by the atheist who finds creation so perfect that it can dispense with a creator.

The charms of the passing woman are generally in direct ratio to the swiftness of our passage.

To the pure all things are pure!

Lies are essential to humanity. They are perhaps as important as the pursuit of pleasure and moreover are dictated by that pursuit.

What a profound significance small things assume when the woman we love conceals them from us.

People can have many different kinds of pleasure. The real one is that for which they will forsake the others.

We are able to find everything in our memory, which is like a dispensary or chemical laboratory in which chance steers our hand sometimes to a soothing drug and sometimes to a dangerous poison.

Three-quarters of the sicknesses of intelligent people come from their intelligence. They need at least a doctor who can understand this sickness.

Happiness serves hardly any other purpose than to make unhappiness possible.

A sort of egotistical self-evaluation is unavoidable in those joys in which erudition and art mingle and in which aesthetic pleasure may become more acute, but not remain as pure.

The only thing that does not change is that at any and every time it appears that there have been great changes.

Love is not vain because it is frustrated, but because it is fulfilled. The people we love turn to ashes when we posess them.

But sometimes the future is latent in us without our knowing it, and our supposedly lying words foreshadow an imminent reality.

All the mind's activity is easy if it is not subjected to reality.

We feel in one world, we think and name in another. Between the two we can set up a system of references, but we cannot fill in the gap.

The one thing more difficult than following a regime is keeping from imposing it on others.

The facts of life do not penetrate to the sphere in which our beliefs are cherished; they did not engender those beliefs, and they are powerless to destroy them.

Photography is the product of complete alienation.

One becomes moral as soon as one is unhappy.

What barrier is so insurmountable as silence?

The courage of one's opinions is always a form of calculating cowardice in the eyes of the "other side.

The world was not created once and for all time for each of us individually. There are added to it in the course of our life things of which we have never had any suspicion.

As soon as he ceased to be mad he became merely stupid. There are maladies we must not seek to cure because they alone protect us from others that are more serious.

The stellar universe is not so difficult to understand as the real actions of other people, especially of the people with whom we are in love.

The tiny, initial clue ... by allowing us to imagine what we do not know, stimulates a desire for knowledge.

Existence is of little interest save on days when the dust of realities is mingled with magic sand.

There can be no peace of mind in love, since the advantage one has secured is never anything but a fresh starting-point for future desires.

Nobility is often no more than the inner aspect which our egotistical feelings assume when we have not yet named and classified them.

Wars are fought for the benefit of oligarchs, triumphs bought with the blood of peons.

It is the tragedy of other people that they are to us merely showcases for the very perishable collections of our own mind.

There was nothing abnormal about it when homosexuality was the norm.

The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it...

I had come in time to learn that it was a mistake to smile a friendly smile when somebody made a fool of me.

We shall see later on that the diversity of the forms of death that circulate invisibly is the cause of the peculiar unexpectedness of obituary notices in the newspapers.

Lies are essential to humanity.

Love is an incurable malady like those pathetic states in which rheumatism affords the sufferer a brief respite only to be replaced by epileptiform headaches.