Marcel Proust Quotes

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

Let us leave pretty women to men devoid of imagination.

You can't learn the truth about a man's intentions by asking him.

A picture's beauty does not depend on the things portrayed in it.

Reality is never more than a first step towards an unknown on the road to which one can never progress very far.

Friendship is in the end no more than: " . . . a lie which seeks to make us believe that we are not irremediably alone."

It is not only by dint of lying to others, but also of lying to ourselves, that we cease to notice that we are lying.

For, just as in the beginning it is formed by desire, so afterwards love is kept in existence only by painful anxiety.

Now are the woods all black, But still the sky is blue.

When we have passed a certain age, the soul of the child we were and the souls of the dead from whom we have sprung come to lavish on us their riches and their spells.

The real stars of society are tired of appearing there. He who is curious to gaze at them must often migrate to another hemisphere, where they are more or less alone.

Our shadows, now parallel, now close together and joined, traced an exquisite pattern at our feet.

When I went to Venice I found that my dream had become-incredibly, but quite simply-my address.

I drank a second mouthful in which I find nothing more than in the first, then a third which gives me rather less than the second. It is time to stop; the potion is losing its magic.

They like my books better in England than in France; a translation would be very successful there.

Women who are to some extent resistant, whom one cannot possess at once, whom one does not even know at first whether one will ever possess, are the only interesting ones.

For every sin there is forgiveness, and especially for the sins of youth.

Under each station of the real, another glimmers.

Laissons les jolies femmes aux hommes sans imagination. Leave the pretty women for the men without imagination.

A man of letters, merely by reading a phrase, can estimate exactly the literary merit of its author.

Memory nourishes the heart, and grief abates.

Those whose suffering is due to love are, as we say of certain invalids, their own physicians.

For a long time I would go to bed early. [Fr., Longtemps, je me suis couche de bonne heure.]

On devient moral de' s qu'on est malheureux. We become moral once we are miserable.

In reality, every reader is, while reading, the reader of his own self.

All the great things we know have come to us from neurotics. It is they who have founded religions and created great works of art.

Perhaps the immobility of the things that surround us is forced upon them by our conviction that they are themselves, and not anything else, and by the immobility of our conceptions of them.

We can only be faithful to what we remember, and we remember only what we have known.

Everything that seems imperishable tends to extinguishment.

Only imagination and belief can differentiate from the rest certain objects, certain people, and can create an atmosphere.

The heart does not lie.

In love, happiness is an abnormal state.

We see things but we don't see them, like things that slid through the mind, one flowing into another.

Beautiful books are always written in a sort of foreign language.

Death is in truth an illness from which we recover

We are all of us obliged, if we are to make reality endurable, to nurse a few little follies in ourselves.

There are mountainous, arduous days, up which one takes an infinite time to climb, and downward-sloping days which one can descend at full tilt, singing as one goes.

If there is one thing more difficult than submitting oneself to a regime it is refraining from imposing it on other people.

Dear Friend: I have nearly died three times since morning.

How else learn the real, if not by inventing what might lie outside it?

It has been said that beauty is a promise of happiness. Conversely, the possibility of pleasure can be a beginning of beauty.

Everybody calls "clear" those ideas which have the same degree of confusion as his own.

She was "a woman of uncertain age.

One reads the papers as one wants to with a bandage over one's eyes without trying to understand the facts, listening to the soothing words of the editor as to the words of one s mistress.

We become moral when we are unhappy.

Our desires cut across one another, and in this confused existence it is rare for happiness to coincide with the desire that clamoured for it.