Famous Marcel Proust Quotations

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"A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left."
by Marcel Proust
"The one thing more difficult than following a regimen is not imposing it on others."
by Marcel Proust
"The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes."
by Marcel Proust
"Things don't change, but by and by our wishes change."
by Marcel Proust
"Let us be grateful to people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom."
by Marcel Proust
"We say that the hour of death cannot be forecast, but when we say this we imagine that hour as placed in an obscure and distant future. It never occurs to us that it has any connection with the day already begun or that death could arrive this same afternoon, this afternoon which is so certain and which has every hour filled in advance."
by Marcel Proust
"The happy man is not he who seems thus to others, but who seems thus to himself."
by Marcel Proust
"[The literary figure who looms largest in] False Papers ... perfected a language ... and a vision that gave memory an introspection and aesthetic scope and magnitude no author had conferred on either before. He allowed intimacy itself to become an art form."
by Marcel Proust
"A catherdral, a wave of storm, a dancer's leap, never turn out to be as high as we had hoped."
by Marcel Proust
"A cathedral, a wave of a storm, a dancer's leap, never turn out to be as high as we had hoped"
by Marcel Proust
"All our final decisions are made in a state of mind that is not going to last."
by Marcel Proust
"Any mental activity is easy if it need not take reality into account"
by Marcel Proust
"Desire makes everything blossom; possession makes everything wither and fade."
by Marcel Proust
"Desire makes everything blossom possession makes everything wither and fade."
by Marcel Proust
"Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself"
by Marcel Proust
"Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and composed our masterpieces."
by Marcel Proust
"For each illness that doctors cure with medicine, they provoke ten in healthy people by inoculating them with the virus that is a thousand times more powerful than any microbe: the idea that one is ill"
by Marcel Proust
"Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind"
by Marcel Proust
"Happiness serves hardly any other purpose than to make unhappiness possible"
by Marcel Proust
"If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time."
by Marcel Proust
"In a separation it is the one who is not really in love who says the more tender things."
by Marcel Proust
"It is a mistake to speak of a bad choice in love, since as soon as a choice exists, it can only be bad."
by Marcel Proust
"It is not because other people are dead that our affection for them grows faint, it is because we ourselves are dying"
by Marcel Proust
"It is often hard to bear the tears that we ourselves have caused"
by Marcel Proust
"Let us be grateful to people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom"
by Marcel Proust
"Let us be grateful to people who make us happy: They are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom."
by Marcel Proust
"Lies are essential to humanity. They are perhaps as important as the pursuit of pleasure and moreover are dictated by that pursuit"
by Marcel Proust
"Like many intellectuals, he was incapable of saying a simple thing in a simple way"
by Marcel Proust
"Love is space and time measured by the heart."
by Marcel Proust
"Only through art can we emerge from ourselves and know what another person sees."
by Marcel Proust
"Our memory is like a shop in the window of which is exposed now one, now another photograph of the same person. And as a rule the most recent exhibit remains for some time the only one to be seen"
by Marcel Proust
"The bonds that unite another person to ourselves exist only in our mind. Memory as it grows fainter relaxes them, and notwithstanding the illusion by which we would fain be cheated and with which, out of love, friendship, politeness, deference, duty, we cheat other people, we exist alone. Man is the creature that cannot emerge from himself, that knows his fellows only in himself when he asserts the contrary, he is lying."
by Marcel Proust
"The bonds that unite another person to our self exist only in our mind"
by Marcel Proust
"The charms of the passing woman are generally in direct proportion to the swiftness of her passing."
by Marcel Proust
"The charms of a passing woman are usually in direct relation to the speed of her passing."
by Marcel Proust
"The fixity of a habit is generally in direct proportion to its absurdity."
by Marcel Proust
"The fixity of a habit is generally in direct proportion to its absurdity"
by Marcel Proust
"The moments of the past do not remain still; they retain in our memory the motion which drew them towards the future, towards a future which has itself become the past, and draw us on in their train"
by Marcel Proust
"The only paradise is paradise lost."
by Marcel Proust
"The only paradise is paradise lost"
by Marcel Proust
"The opinions we hold of one another, our relations with friends and kinfolk are in no sense permanent, save in appearance, but are as eternally fluid as the sea itself."
by Marcel Proust
"The real voyage of discovery consists, not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes."
by Marcel Proust
"The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes."
by Marcel Proust
"The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes"
by Marcel Proust
"The time which we have at our disposal every day is elastic; the passions we feel expand it, those that we inspire contract it, and habit fills up what remains"
by Marcel Proust
"The true paradises are paradises we have lost."
by Marcel Proust
"The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes."
by Marcel Proust
"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."
by Marcel Proust
"There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book"
by Marcel Proust
"There is no one, no matter how wise he is, who has not in his youth said things or done things that are so unpleasant to recall in later life that he would expunge them entirely from his memory if that were possible."
by Marcel Proust
"There is no man, however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived in a way the consciousness of which is so unpleasant to him in later life that he would gladly, if he could, expunge it from his memory"
by Marcel Proust
"Time passes, and little by little everything that we have spoken in falsehood becomes true"
by Marcel Proust
"We are healed from suffering only by experiencing it to the full."
by Marcel Proust
"We are healed from suffering only by experiencing it to the full"
by Marcel Proust
"We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us"
by Marcel Proust
"We don't receive wisdom we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take us or spare us."
by Marcel Proust
"We must never be afraid to go too far, for success lies just beyond."
by Marcel Proust
"We must never be afraid to go too far, for success lies just beyond"
by Marcel Proust
"What a profound significance small things assume when the woman we love conceals them from us."
by Marcel Proust
"What a profound significance small things assume when the woman we love conceals them from us"
by Marcel Proust
"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."
by Marcel Proust
"It is in moments of illness that we are compelled to recognize that we live not alone but chained to a creature of a different kingdom, whole worlds apart, who has no knowledge of us and by whom it is impossible to make ourselves understood: our body."
by Marcel Proust
"There's nothing like desire to prevent the things one says from having any resemblance to the things in one's mind."
by Marcel Proust
"The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new landscapes, but in having new eyes, in seeing the universe with the eyes of another, of hundreds of others, in seeing the hundreds of universes that each of them sees."
by Marcel Proust
"The mistakes made by doctors are innumerable. They err habitually on the side of optimism as to treatment, of pessimism as to the outcome."
by Marcel Proust
"For each illness that doctors cure with medicine, they provoke ten in healthy people by inoculating them with the virus that is a thousand times more powerful than any microbe: the idea that one is ill."
by Marcel Proust
"When the mind has a tendency to dream, it is a mistake to keep dreams away from it, to ration its dreams. So long as you distract your mind from its dreams, it will not know them for what they are; you will always be being taken in by the appearance of things, because you will not have grasped their true nature. If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time. One must have a thorough understanding of one"
by Marcel Proust
"A cathedral, a wave of storm, a dancer's leap, never turn out to be as high as we had hoped."
by Marcel Proust
"The features of our face are hardly more than gestures which force of habit made permanent. Nature, like the destruction of Pompeii, like the metamorphosis of a nymph into a tree, has arrested us in an accustomed movement."
by Marcel Proust
"Happiness serves hardly any other purpose than to make unhappiness possible."
by Marcel Proust
"Illness is the doctor to whom we pay most heed; to kindness, to knowledge we make promise only; pain we obey."
by Marcel Proust
"A woman one loves rarely suffices for all our needs, so we deceive her with another whom we do not love."
by Marcel Proust
"We are able to find everything in our memory, which is like a dispensary or chemical laboratory in which chance steers our hand sometimes to a soothing drug and sometimes to a dangerous poison."
by Marcel Proust
"That translucent alabaster of our memories."
by Marcel Proust
"Our memory is like a shop in the window of which is exposed now one, now another photograph of the same person. And as a rule the most recent exhibit remains for some time the only one to be seen."
by Marcel Proust
"The paradoxes of today are the prejudices of tomorrow, since the most benighted and the most deplorable prejudices have had their moment of novelty when fashion lent them its fragile grace."
by Marcel Proust
"As the Arab proverb says, The dog barks and the caravan passes. After having dropped this quotation, Mr. Norpois stopped to judge the effect it had on us. It was great; the proverb was known to us: it had been replaced that year among men of high worth by this other: Whoever sows the wind reaps the storm, which had needed some rest since it was not as indefatigable and hardy as, Working for the King of Prussia."
by Marcel Proust
"The time which we have at our disposal every day is elastic; the passions we feel expand it, those that we inspire contract it, and habit fills up what remains."
by Marcel Proust
"It is always during a passing state of mind that we make lasting resolutions."
by Marcel Proust
"We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it in full."
by Marcel Proust
"A change in the weather is sufficient to recreate the world and ourselves."
by Marcel Proust
"There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book."
by Marcel Proust
"... automatically, worn out by the gloomy day and by the perspective of a sad tomorrow, I put in my mouth a spoonful of tea in which I had sof..."
by Marcel Proust
"A Carpaccio in Venice, la Berma in Phèdre, masterpieces of visual or theatrical art that the prestige surrounding them made so alive, that is..."
by Marcel Proust
"... whenever Odette told a stupid story, Swann listened to his wife with a compliance, a gaiety, almost an admiration where some remnants of s..."
by Marcel Proust
"As the Arab proverb says, 'The dog barks and the caravan passes'. After having dropped this quotation, Mr. Norpois stopped to judge the effect..."
by Marcel Proust
"For women who do not love us, as for the 'disappeared', knowing that we no longer have any hope does not prevent us form continuing to wait. W..."
by Marcel Proust
"I find very reasonable the Celtic belief that the souls of our dearly departed are trapped in some inferior being, in an animal, a plant, an i..."
by Marcel Proust
"In times like ours, where the growing complexity of life leaves us barely the time to read the newspapers, where the map of Europe has endured..."
by Marcel Proust
"Knowing does not always allow us to prevent, but at least the things that we know, we hold them, if not in our hands, but at least in our thou..."
by Marcel Proust
"Perhaps it is nothingness which is real and our dream which is non-existent, but then we feel think that these musical phrases, and the notion..."
by Marcel Proust
"True variety is in that plenitude of real and unexpected elements, in the branch charged with blue flowers thrusting itself, against all expec..."
by Marcel Proust
"We say that the hour of death cannot be forecast, but when we say this we imagine that hour as placed in an obscure and distant future. It nev..."
by Marcel Proust
"When I was small child, all that belonged to conservative society was fashionable, and no republicans were welcome in the smarter salons. Peop..."
by Marcel Proust


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