Marcel Proust Quotes
People are not always very tolerant of the tears which they themselves have provoked.
As soon as jealousy is discovered, it is regarded by the person who is its object as a challenge which justifies deception.
...pretention is very close to stupidity and that simplicity has a less visible but still gratifying aspect.
After luncheon the sun, conscious that it was Saturday, would blaze an hour longer in the zenith, ...
Jean's desires, like those of all men in love, were concentrated on the impossible.
We imagine always when we speak that it is our own ears, our own mind, that are listening.
... it had arrested for all eternity the moment which it had been trying to make pass more quickly.
Gardeners produce flowers that are delicious dreams, and others too that are like nightmares.
And what little she allowed herself to say was said in a strained tone, in which her ingrained timidity paralysed her tendency to freedom and audacity of speech.
Even from the point of view of coquetry, pure and simple, " he had told her, "can't you see how much of your attraction you throw away when you stoop to lying?
Was the happiness of knowing these girls really unattainable? It would certainly not have been the first happiness of that sort which I had abandoned all hope of ever enjoying?
It was not that Madame Santeuil's moral values had altered, but only her view of the moral values of others.
... the serpent hissing between the lips of Envy is so huge, and so completely fills her wide-opened mouth that the muscles of her face are strained and contorted, ...
... the reigns of the kings and queens who are portrayed as kneeling with clasped hands in the windows of churches, were stained by oppression and bloodshed.
Dinner-parties bore us because our imagination is absent, and reading interests us because it is keeping us company.
A person has no need of sincerity, nor even of skill in lying, in order to be loved. Here I mean by love reciprocal torture.
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 favourite book.
We do not succeed in changing things according to our desire but gradually our desire changes.
It is always thus impaled by a state of mind which is destined not to last that we make our irrevocable decisions.
The opinions which we hold of one another our relations with friends and kinsfolk are in no sense permanent save in appearance but are as eternally fluid as the sea itself.
At the heart of our friendly or purely social relations there lurks a hostility momentarily cured but recurring in fits and starts.
There can be no peace of mind in love since the advantage one has secured is never anything by a fresh starting-point for further desires.
There can be no peace of mind in love since the advantage one has secured is never anything but a fresh starting-point for further desires.
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.
The time which we have at our disposal every day is elastic the passions that we feel expand it those that we inspire contract it and habit fills up the rest.
The time which we have at our disposal every day is elastic the passions that we feel expand it those that we inspire contract it and habit fills up what remains.
Certainly, it is more reasonable to devote one's life to women than to postage stamps, old snuff-boxes, or even to paintings and statues.
We don't receive wisdom we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.