Marcel Proust quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Marcel Proust

Marcel Proust Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Marcel Proust on Wise Famous Quotes.

Ideas are substitutes for sorrows...

For a long time I would go to bed early.
[Fr., Longtemps, je me suis couche de bonne heure.]

If only for the sake of elegance, I try to remain morally pure.

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

There's nothing like desire to prevent the things one says from having any resemblance to the things in one's mind.

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.

But the presence of Odette continued to sow in Swann's heart alternate seeds of love and suspicion.

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

In the V-shaped opening of her crape bodice Mlle. Vinteuil felt the sting of her friend's sudden kiss; ...

In love, happiness is an abnormal state.

Habit is a second nature which prevents us from knowing the first, of which it has neither the cruelties nor the enchantments.

A new book was not one of a number of similar objects, but was like an individual man, unmatched, and with no cause of existence beyond himself.

People wish to learn to swim and at the same time to keep one foot on the ground.

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.

Whose inferiority proclaimed her own supremacy so loud ...

I live so resolutely apart from physical contingencies that my senses no longer trouble to inform me of them.

Sterile, splendid torture of understanding and loving ...

Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.

The person with whom we are in love is to be recognised only by the intensity of the pain that we suffer.

Often it is just lack of imagination that keeps a man from suffering very much.

Only that which is absent can be imagined.

Only that issues from ourselves which we ourselves extract from the darkness within ourselves and which is unknown to others.

Illness is the doctor to whom we pay most heed; to kindness, to knowledge, we make promise only; pain we obey.

Everything great in the world is done by neurotics; they alone founded our religions and created our masterpieces.

Happiness is salutary for the body but sorrow develops the powers of the spirit.

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

I have a horror of sunsets; they're so romantic, so operatic.

She lived her life, but I may have been the only one to dream it.

My dear," she had said to Mamma, "I could not bring myself to give the child anything that was not well written,

We remember the truth because it has a name, is rooted in the past, but a makeshift lie is quickly forgotten.

Combray, we used often to invite him to our house.

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.

For, just as in the beginning it is formed by desire, so afterwards love is kept in existence only by painful anxiety.

Until custom had changed the colour of the curtains, made the clock keep quiet, brought

We can only be faithful to what we remember, and we remember only what we have known.

Washed clean like a porcelain, with housewifely care ...

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

He sat there silent, watching their love expire.

For a long time I used to go to bed early.

For each of us sees clarity only in those ideas which have the same degree of confusion as his own.

For instinct dictates our duty and the intellect supplies us with pretexts for evading it.

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

The young woman's smiling lips met his caresses halfway, and her eyes shone in their depths like pools warmed by the sun.

With intelligent people, three-quarters of the things they suffer from come from their intelligence.

Fall in love with a dog's bum,
And thou'll think it pretty as a plum.

The habit of thinking prevents us at times from experiencing reality, immunises us against it, makes it seem no more than any other thought.

breathed into this quite ordinary prose a kind of life, continuous and full of feeling. My

Desiring a will was not enough. I would have needed precisely what I could not have without willpower: a will.

That form of the instinct of self-preservation with which we guard everything that is best in ourselves ...

Attachment to an object always brings death to the possessor.

since she would never have practised the cult of these things, she would take no impious delight in their profanation.

That distant look characteristic of people who do not wish to be agreeable ...

Each of us is indeed alone.

Self-centredness thus enabling every human being to see the universe spread out in descending tiers beneath himself who is its lord,

As a man with imagination you can enjoy only in regret or in anticipation - that is, in the past or in the future.

We become moral when we are unhappy.

The fixity of a habit is generally in direct proportion to its absurdity.

One must never miss an opportunity of quoting things by others which are always more interesting than those one thinks up oneself.

The smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us ...

Her eyes seemed to promise a spirit forever capsized in the diseased waters of regret.

True life life at last discovered and illuminated the only life therefore really lived that life is literature.

We feel in one world, we think and name in another. Between the two we can set up a system of references, but we cannot fill in the gap.

Left with me were more difficult to extinguish than the memory of their original cause.

The only paradise is paradise lost.

Reality is never more than a first step towards an unknown on the road to which one can never progress very far.

It was not evil that gave her the idea of pleasure, that seemed to her attractive; it was pleasure, rather, that seemed evil.

Beautiful books are always written in a sort of foreign language.

Let us be grateful
to people who
make us happy;
they are the
charming gardeners
who make our
souls bloom.

Wars are fought for the benefit of oligarchs, triumphs bought with the blood of peons.

What most enraptured me were the asparagus.

We live not alone but chained to a creature of a different kingdom: our body.

All the great writers are like that: the beauty of their sentences, like the beauty of a woman one has not yet met, is unforeseeable ...

One might almost say that works of literature are like artesian wells, the deeper the suffering, the higher they rise.)

Our shadows, now parallel, now close together and joined, traced an exquisite pattern at our feet.

In a separation it is the one who is not really in love who says the more tender things.

Sometimes in this life, under the stress of an exceptional emotion, people do say what they think.

The theatre of the world is stocked with fewer settings than actors, and with fewer actors than situations.

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.

A cathedral, a wave of a storm, a dancer's leap, never turn out to be as high as we had hoped.

The thought of being made comfortable gives him strength to endure his pain.

It comes so soon, the moment when there is nothing left to wait for.

Our intonations contain our philosophy of life, what each of us is constantly telling himself about things.

Time passes, and little by little everything that we have spoken in falsehood becomes true.

... with a quiet suggestion of infinity...

We are all of us obliged, if we are to make reality endurable, to nurse a few little follies in ourselves.

Do you think it possible for a woman really to be touched by a man's being in love with her, and never to be unfaithful to him?

After luncheon the sun, conscious that it was Saturday, would blaze an hour longer in the zenith, ...

Like many intellectuals, he was incapable of saying a simple thing in a simple way

They like my books better in England than in France; a translation would be very successful there.

Anything we have not had to decipher, to bring to light by our own effort, anything which was already clearly visible, is not our own.

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

Dear Friend: I have nearly died three times since morning.

Only by art can we get outside ourselves, instead of seeing only one world, our own, we see it under multiple forms.

No man is a complete mystery except to himself.

To the pure all things are pure!

She was not yet dead. But I was already alone.

The mistakes of doctors are innumerable. They err as a rule out of optimism as to the treatment, and pessimism as to the outcome.

We love only what we do not wholly possess.

Dinner-parties bore us because our imagination is absent, and reading interests us because it is keeping us company.

Our desires cut across one another, and in this confused existence it is rare for happiness to coincide with the desire that clamoured for it.