Marcel Proust Quotes: top 100 famous quotes about Marcel Proust

Marcel Proust Quotes & Sayings

Happy to read and share the best inspirational Marcel Proust quotes, sayings and quotations on Wise Famous Quotes.

Ideas are substitutes for sorrows... — Marcel Proust

But sometimes the future is latent in us without our knowing it, and our supposedly lying words foreshadow an imminent reality. — Marcel Proust

We must never be afraid to go too far, for truth lies beyond. — Marcel Proust

People are not always very tolerant of the tears which they themselves have provoked. — Marcel Proust

Let us leave pretty women to men with no imagination. — Marcel Proust

Love is space and time measured by the heart. — Marcel Proust

This rubicund youth, with his blunt features, appeared for all the world to have a tomato instead of a head. — Marcel Proust

... my body ... faithful guardian of a past which my mind should never have forgotten, brought back before my eyes .... — Marcel Proust

All the mind's activity is easy if it is not subjected to reality. — Marcel Proust

His work kept on living, like the watches on the wrists of dead soldiers. [Said of Marcel Proust] — Jean Cocteau

We think and name in one world, we live and feel in another. — Marcel Proust

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

Only imagination and belief can differentiate from the rest certain objects, certain people, and can create an atmosphere. — Marcel Proust

How often is not the prospect of future happiness thus sacrificed to one's impatient insistence upon an immediate gratification. — Marcel Proust

The hope of being relieved gives him the courage to suffer. — Marcel Proust

When I am not too sad to listen, music is my consolation. — Marcel Proust

Unfortunately my parents had recourse to principles entirely different from those which I suggested they should adopt — Marcel Proust

could still believe in their possible presence; for memory was now set in motion; — Marcel Proust

I felt even disappointed when he resumed the thread of his narrative. — Marcel Proust

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. — Marcel Proust

Let us leave pretty women to men devoid of imagination. — Marcel Proust

An hour is not merely an hour; it is a vase full of scents and sounds and projects and climates. — Marcel Proust

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

Love is a striking example of how little reality means to us. — Marcel Proust

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

I loved her; I was sorry not to have had the time and the inspiration to insult her, to do her some injury, to force her to keep some memory of me. — Marcel Proust

What a profound significance small things assume when the woman we love conceals them from us. — Marcel Proust

His strength was restored and, with it, all his desires to live; he went out, began living again, and died a second time for himself. — Marcel Proust

always wrapped in the mystery of the Merovingian age, — Marcel Proust

A language which we do not know is a fortress sealed. — Marcel Proust

Gardeners produce flowers that are delicious dreams, and others too that are like nightmares. — Marcel Proust

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

A powerful idea communicates some of its strength to him who challenges it. — Marcel Proust

But when one believes in the reality of things, making them visible by artificial means is not quite the same as feeling that they are close at hand. — Marcel Proust

Truth is a point of view about things. — Marcel Proust

Then the concerts came to an end, the weather turned bad and my girls left Balbec, not all at once, as the swallows leave, but within the same week. — Marcel Proust

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

the sweetness to be found in generosity — Marcel Proust

How paradoxical it is to search reality for the pictures that are stored in one's memory. — Marcel Proust

Death is in truth an illness from which we recover — Marcel Proust

I felt myself still reliving a past which was no longer anything more than the history of another person; — Marcel Proust

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

There are optical errors in time as there are in space. — Marcel Proust

The charms of a passing woman are usually in direct relation to the speed of her passing. — Marcel Proust

Things don't change, but by and by our wishes change. — Marcel Proust

It's far more difficult to disfigure a great work of art than to create one. — Marcel Proust

Desire makes everything blossom — Marcel Proust

That translucent alabaster of our memories. — Marcel Proust

We do not succeed in changing things according to our desire, but gradually our desire changes. — Marcel Proust

And if she had appeared, would I have dared to speak to her? — Marcel Proust

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

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

I had come in time to learn that it was a mistake to smile a friendly smile when somebody made a fool of me. — Marcel Proust

Friendship is in the end no more than: " ... a lie which seeks to make us believe that we are not irremediably alone." — Marcel Proust

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

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

The oddities of charming people exasperate us, but there are few if any charming people who are not, at the same time, odd. — Marcel Proust

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

It is the tragedy of other people that they are merely showcases for the very perishable collections of one's own mind. — Marcel Proust

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

Any mental activity is easy if it need not take reality into account. — Marcel Proust

Existence is of little interest save on days when the dust of realities is mingled with magic sand. — Marcel Proust

Each one of us is not a single person, but contains many persons who have not all the same moral value — Marcel Proust

I must choose to cease from suffering or to cease from loving. — Marcel Proust

We remember an atmosphere because girls were smiling in it. — Marcel Proust

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 ... — Marcel Proust

Like an entirely cloudless sky when one is going mountaineering ... — Marcel Proust

Reading is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude. — Marcel Proust

The loss of a sense adds as much beauty to the world as its acquisition. — Marcel Proust

I longed for nothing more than to behold a stormy sea, less as a mighty spectacle than as a momentary revelation of the true life of nature; — Marcel Proust

What had to move - a leaf of the chestnut tree, for instance - moved. — Marcel Proust

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. — Marcel Proust

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

Now my uncle knew many of them [actresses] personally, and also ladies of another class, not clearly distinguished from actresses in my mind. — Marcel Proust

It was impossible for me to thank my father; what he called my sentimentality would have exasperated him. — Marcel Proust

So long as I know what's boiling in my pot I don't bother my head about what's in other people's. — Marcel Proust

There is nothing like desire for obstructing any resemblance between what one says and what one has on one's mind. — Marcel Proust

Men who do their work intelligently and earnestly have an aversion to those who want to make literature out of what they do, to make it important. — Marcel Proust

The only paradise is paradise lost. — Marcel Proust

Our worst fears, like our greatest hopes, are not outside our powers, and we can come in the end to triumph over the former and to achieve the latter. — Marcel Proust

The kiss, the bodily surrender which would seem natural and but moderately attractive ... — Marcel Proust

Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and composed our masterpieces. — Marcel Proust

The breath of the enchanted wind mingles the fresh scent of the lilacs with the fragrance of the past. — Marcel Proust

It is only with the passions of others that we are ever really familiar, and what we come to discover about our own can only be learned from them. — Marcel Proust

When a man is asleep, he has in a circle round him the chain of the hours, the sequence of the years, the order of the heavenly host. — Marcel Proust

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

A change in the weather is sufficient to recreate the world and ourselves. — Marcel Proust

The stellar universe is not so difficult of comprehension as the real actions of other people. — Marcel Proust

Your soul is a dark forest. But the trees are of a particular species, they are genealogical trees. — Marcel Proust

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

Nobility is often no more than the inner aspect which our egotistical feelings assume when we have not yet named and classified them. — Marcel Proust

We are at times too ready to believe that the present is the only possible state of things. — Marcel Proust

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

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

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

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

What most enraptured me were the asparagus. — Marcel Proust

The inertia of the mind urges it to slide down the easy slope of imagination, rather than to climb the steep slope of introspection. — Marcel Proust

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

I was not unhappy, except one day at a time. — Marcel Proust