Marcel Proust Quotes

What artists call posterity is the posterity of the work of art.

The only true voyage would be not to travel through a hundred different lands, but to see the same land through a hundred different pairs of eyes.

The most powerful soporific is sleep itself.

Most of our faculties lie dormant because they can rely upon Habit, which knows what there is to be done and has no need of their services.

Le bonheur est dans l'amour un e tat anormal. In love, happiness is abnormal.

Fashions, being themselves begotten of the desire for change, are quick to change also.

There are people whose faces assume an unaccustomed beauty and majesty the moment they cease to look out of their eyes.

La possession de ce qu'on aime est une joie plus grande encore que l'amour. Possessing what one loves is an even greater joy than love itself.

That which we remember of our conduct is ignored by our closest neighbour; but that which we have forgotten having said, or even what we never said, will cause laughter even into the next world.

L'adulte' re introduit l'esprit dans la lettre quebien souvent le mariage e u" t laisse e morte. Adultery breathes new life into marriages which have been left for dead.

Less disappointing than life, great works of art do not begin by giving us all their best.

I had long since given up trying to extract from a woman as it were the square root of her unknown quantity, the mystery of which a mere introduction was generally enough to dispel.

Having a body is in itself the greatest threat to the mind... The body encloses the mind in a fortress; before long the mind is besieged on all sides, and in the end the mind has to give itself up.

One says the things which one feels the need to say, and which the other will not understand: one speaks for oneself alone.

We don't receive wisdom we must discover it for ourselves.

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

When one feels oneself smitten by love for a woman, one ought to say to oneself, “What are her surroundings? What has been her life? All one’s future happiness lies in the answer.

... there was no need for him to hasten towards the attainment of a happiness already captured and held in a safe place, which would not escape his grasp again.

Much that for us is fraught with with happiness or misery, remains almost unnoticed by the rest of the world.

... the idea that 'Life' contains situations more interesting and more romantic than all the romances ever written.

For every death is a simplification of existence for the others, removes the necessity to show gratitude, the obligation to pay visits.

A work in which there are theories is like an object which still has its price-tag on.

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.

There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we believe we left without having lived them, those we spent with a favorite book.

On no days of our childhood did we live so fully perhaps as those we thought we had left behind without living them, those that we spent with a favourite book.

No days, perhaps, of all our childhood are ever so fully lived are those that we had regarded as not being lived at all: days spent wholly with a favourite book.

A book is no mere book anymore than man can be mere man. A book was like an individual man, unmatched and with no cause of existence beyond himself.

This book of mine has not been manufactured: it has been garnered.

Let us leave pretty women to men with no imagination.

With women who do not love us, as with the "dear departed, " the knowledge that there is no hope left does not prevent us from continuing to wait.

I was not one man only but the steady advance hour after hour of an army in close formation, in which there appeared, according to the moment, impassioned men, indifferent men, jealous men.

Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself.

We needed germans in Paris to hear Wagner.

Why did you not forget your heart also? I should never have let you have that back." ...

After a certain age, and even if we develop in quite different ways, the more we become ourselves, the more our family traits are accentuated.

It is grief that develops the powers of the mind.

Every woman feels that the greater her power over a man, the more impossible it is to leave him except by sudden flight: a fugitive precisely because a queen.

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

But I consoled myself with the reflexion that in spite of everything she was for me the real point of intersection between reality and dream.

So difficult is it for us to know, with the dead as with the living, whether a thing would cause them joy or sorrow!

She was capable of causing me pain, but no longer any joy. Pain alone kept my wearisome attachment alive.

... rejoicing in a peace which brings only an increase of anxiety, ...

She [Mme des Laumes] belonged to that half of the human race in whom the curiosity the other half feels about the people it does not know is replaced by an interest in the people it does.

As with the future, it is not all at once but grain by grain that one savours the past.

I could no longer desire physically without feeling a need for her, without suffering from her absence.

One felt that in her renunciation of life she had deliberately abandoned those places in which she might at least have been able to see the man she loved, for others where he had never trod.

Sadness had reigned in undisputed sovereignty over his shadowed childhood.

The wretchedness of ordinary life, endured so gaily when it is part of our normal existence, is made far worse when it comes as something new, and is exaggerated by the working of the imagination.

It is often simply from lack of creative imagination that we do not go far enough in suffering.

Presently, one after another, like shyly hopping sparrows, her friends arrived, black against the snow.