Marcel Proust Quotes

Not caring for their lives' is it? Why, what in the world is there that we should care for if it's not our lives, the only gift the Lord never offers us a second time.

Nous sommes tous oblige s, pour rendre la re alite supportable, d'entretenir en nous quelques petites folies. We must all indulge in a few follies if we are to make reality bearable.

L'ide e qu'on mourra est plus cruelle que mourir, mais moins que l'ide e qu'un autre est mort. The idea of dying is worse than dying itself, but less cruel than the idea that another has died.

So long as I know what's boiling in my pot I don't bother my head about what's in other people's.

There is no doubt that a person's charms are less frequently a cause of love than a remark such as: 'No, this evening I shan't be free'.

But,instead of what our imagination makes us suppose and which we worthless try to discover,life gives us something that we could hardly imagine.

In summoning even the wisest of physicians to our aid, it is probably that he is relying upon a scientific "truth", the error of which will become obvious in just a few years' time.

How paradoxical it is to search reality for the pictures that are stored in one's memory.

Things don't change, but by and by our wishes change.

Error, by force of contrast, enhances the triumph of Truth.

The loss of a sense adds as much beauty to the world as its acquisition.

The only possible paradises are those we have lost

A doctor who doesn't say too many foolish things is a patient half-cured.

The truth is that men can have several sorts of pleasure. The true pleasure is the one for which they abandon the other.

Let a prize lower my position, if it causes me to be read; that I prefer immediately to all the honors.

I should have been happy: I wasn’t.

And so when studying faces, we do indeed measure them, but as painters, not as surveyors.

For neither our greatest fears nor our greatest hopes are beyond the limits of our strength--we are able in the end both to dominate the first and to achieve the second.

We only really know what is new, what suddenly introduces to our sensibility a change of tone which strikes us, that for which habit has not yet substituted its pale fac-similes.

That translucent alabaster of our memories.

According to a charming law of nature which is evident even in the most sophisticated societies, we live in complete ignorance of whatever we love.

For one cannot change, that is to say become another person, while continuing to acquiesce to the feelings of the person one no longer is.

To a great extent, suffering is a sort of need felt by the organism to make itself familiar with a new state, which makes it uneasy, to adapt its sensibility to that state.

L'adolescence est le seul temps o u' l'on ait appris quelque chose. Adolescence is the only time when we can learn something.

The past not merely is not fugitive, it remains present.

I believe that all true art is classic, but the dictates of the mind rarely permit of its being recognized as such when it first appears.

Unkind people imagine themselves to be inflicting pain on someone equally unkind.

It is desire that engenders belief and if we fail as a rule to take this into account, it is because most of the desires that create beliefs end only with our own life.

There is no idea that does not carry in itself a possible refutation, no word that does not imply its opposite.

But when one believes in the reality of things, making them visible by artificial means is not quite the same as feeling that they are close at hand.

There is not a woman in the world the possession of whom is as precious as that of the truths which she reveals to us by causing us to suffer.

It is only with the passions of others that we are ever really familiar, and what we come to discover about our own can only be learned from them.

The true paradises are the paradises that we have lost.

It is a mistake to speak of a bad choice in love, since, as soon as a choice exists, it can only be bad.

We strive all the time to give our life its form, but we do so by copying willy-nilly, like a drawing, the features of the person that we are and not of the person we should like to be.

Any mental activity is easy if it need not be subjected to reality.

Proust was the greatest novelist of the twentieth century, just as Tolstoy was in the nineteenth.

We ought at least, from prudence, never to speak of ourselves, because that is a subject on which we may be sure that other people's views are never in accordance with our own.

Aristocracy is a relative thing. And there are plenty of out-of-the-way places where the son of an upholsterer is the arbiter of fashion and reigns over a court like any young Prince of Wales.

Habit is, of all the plants of human growth, the one that has the least need of nutritious soil in order to live, and is the first to appear on the most seemingly barren rock.

The particulars of life do not matter to the artist; they merely provide him with the opportunity to lay bare his genius.

Griefs, at the moment when they change into ideas, lose some of their power to injure our heart.

People who laugh so heartily at what they themselves have said, when it is not funny, dispense us accordingly, by taking upon themselves the responsibility for the mirth, from joining in it.

...Hard people are weak people whom nobody wants, and the strong, caring little whether they are wanted or not, have alone that meekness which the common herd mistake for weakness.

Most of the supposed expressions of our feelings merely relieve us of them by drawing them out of us in an indistinct form that does not teach us to know them.

For theories and schools, like microbes and corpuscles, devour one another and by their strife ensure the continuity of life.

Words do not change their meanings so drastically in the course of centuries as, in our minds, names do in the course of a year or two.

A work should convey its entire meaning by itself, imposing it on the spectator even before he knows what the subject is.

Man is the creature that cannot emerge from himself, that knows his fellows only in himself; when he asserts the contrary, he is lying.

We were resigned to suffering, thinking that we loved outside ourselves, and we perceive that our love is a function of our sorrow, that our love perhaps is our sorrow.