Marcel Proust Quotes
Let us be grateful to people who make us happy, they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.
Do not wait for life. Do not long for it. Be aware, always and at every moment, that the miracle is in the here and now.
When you work to please others you can't succeed, but the things you do to satisfy yourself stand a chance of catching someone's interest.
We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.
One must never miss an opportunity of quoting things by others which are always more interesting than those one thinks up oneself.
Sometimes in this life, under the stress of an exceptional emotion, people do say what they think.
If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time.
Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and composed our masterpieces.
Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.
In a separation it is the one who is not really in love who says the more tender things.
There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book.
The only true voyage of discovery, . . . would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes.
The sensitiveness claimed by neurotic is matched by their egotism: they cannot abide the flaunting by others of the sufferings to which they pay an even increasing amount of attention in themselves.
Like everybody who is not in love, he thought one chose the person to be loved after endless deliberations and on the basis of particular qualities or advantages.
A photograph acquires something of the dignity which it ordinarily lacks when it ceases to be a reproduction of reality and shows us things that no longer exist.
Like a kaleidoscope which is every now and then given a turn, society arranges successively in different orders elements which one would have supposed immutable, and composes a new pattern.
As long as men are free to ask what they must, free to say what they think, free to think what they will, freedom can never be lost and science can never regress.
Le temps qui change les e" tres ne modifie pas l'image que nous avons garde e d'eux. Although time changes people, it cannot change the image we have already made of them.
Nine tenths of the ills from which intelligent people suffer spring from their intellect.
The creation of the world did not occur at the beginning of time, it occurs every day.
Thanks to art, instead of seeing one world, our own, we see it multiplied and as many original artists as there are, so many worlds are at our disposal.
To write that essential book, a great writer does not need to invent it but merely to translate it, since it already exists in each one of us. The duty and task of a writer are those of translator.
The time at our disposal each day is elastic; the passions we feel dilate it, those that inspire us shrink it, and habit fills it.
Even from the simplest, the most realistic point of view, the countries which we long for occupy, at any given moment, a far larger place in our actual life than the country in which we happen to be.
Your soul is a dark forest. But the trees are of a particular species, they are genealogical trees.
An hour is not merely an hour, it is a vase full of scents and sounds and projects and climates.
A fashionable milieu is one in which everybody's opinion is made up of the opinion of all the others. Has everybody a different opinion? Then it is a literary milieu.
We do not succeed in changing things according to our desire, but gradually our desire changes.
The bonds that unite us to another human being are sanctified when he or she adopts the same point of view as ourselves in judging one of our imperfections.
