Marcel Proust Quotes

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

3549

We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.

4044

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.

3195

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

4774

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.

4788

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

2953

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.

2482

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.

1875

That our words are, as a general rule, filled by the people to whom we address them with a meaning which those people desire from their own substance, a meaning widely different from that which we had put into the same words when we uttered them, is a fact which is perpetually demonstrated in daily life.

3571

... she had uttered these words simply in order to provoke a reply in certain other words, which she seemed, indeed, to wish to hear spoken, but, from prudence, would let her friend be the first to speak.

3408

Bodily passion, which has been so unjustly decried, compels its victims to display every vestige that is in them of unselfishness and generosity, and so effectively that they shine resplendent in the eyes of all beholders.

1489

[...] they imagine that the life they are obliged to lead is not that for which they are really fitted, and they bring to their regular occupations either a fantastic indifference or a sustained and lofty application, scornful, bitter and conscientious.

3369

No doubt, having developed the habit, out of idleness, of each day putting off my work until the day after, I thought that death could be dealt with in the same way.

4649

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

4188

My destination is no longer a place, rather a new way of seeing.

1025

People do not die for us immediately, but remain bathed in a sort of aura of
life which bears no relation to true immortality but through which they
continue to occupy our thoughts in the same way as when they were alive. It
is as though they were traveling abroad.

4155

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

1396

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

1883

Reading is at the threshold of the spiritual life; it can introduce us to it. It does not constitute it ... There are certain cases of spiritual depression in which reading can become a sort of curative discipline ... reintroducing a lazy mind into the life of the Spirit.

2855

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

4945

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

4697

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

3062

We have such numerous interests in our lives that it is not uncommon, on a single occasion, for the foundations of a happiness that does not yet exist to be laid down alongside the intensification of a grief from which we are still suffering.

4209

... 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.

3133

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

4537

[...] to me 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 [...]

3924

No doubt my books too, like my mortal being, would eventually die, one day. But one has to resign oneself to dying. One accepts the thought that in ten years oneself, in a hundred years one's books, will not exist. Eternal duration is no more promised to books than it is to men.

1657

The fault I find in our journalism is that it forces us to take an interest in some fresh triviality or other everyday, whereas only three or four books in a lifetime give us anything that is of real importance.

1405

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.

1259

I never allow myself to be influenced in the smallest degree either by atmospheric disturbances or by the arbitrary divisions of what is known as Time.

1497

The creation of the world did not occur at the beginning of time, it occurs every day.

1283

There are optical errors in time as there are in space.

3321

Love is space and time made perceptible to the heart.

4093

...the novelist has brought us to that state, in which, as in all purely mental states, every emotion is multiplied tenfold, into which his book comes to disturb us as might a dream, but a dream more lucid, and of a more lasting impression than those which comes to us in sleep;

4774

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

4623

Let us leave pretty women to men with no imagination.

1017

... until it had acquired the strength to create in my mind a fresh example of absolute, unproductive beauty...

2524

My dears, laugh at me if you like; it is not conventionally beautiful, but there is something in its quaint old face which pleases me. If it could play the piano, I am sure it would really play.

4330

The beauty of images lies behind things, the beauty of ideas in front of them.

1951

To see how pretty an old woman once was, it is not enough just to look at each feature; they must be translated.

1275

And so her parents-in-law, whom she still regarded as the most eminent people in France, declared that she was an angel; all the more so because they preferred to appear, in marrying their son to her, to have yielded to the attraction rather of her natural charm than of her considerable fortune.

4441

Her [Odette's] eyes were beautiful, but so large they seemed to droop beneath their own weight, strained the rest of her face and always made her appear unwell or in a bad mood.

1393

You know Balbec so well - do you have friends in the area?'
I have friends wherever there are companies of trees, wounded but not vanquished, which huddle together with touching obstinacy to implore an inclement and pitiless sky.'
That is not what I meant,' interrupted my father, as obstinate as the trees and as pitiless as the sky.

2003

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

3943

For with the perturbations of memory are linked the intermittencies of the heart.

3170

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.

4820

Our vanity, our passions, our spirit of imitation, our abstract intelligence, our habits have long been at work, and it is the task of art to undo this work of theirs, making us travel back in the direction from which we have come to the depths where what has really existed lies unknown within us.

4108

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

1207

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

3446

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

3792

I felt that I did not really remember her except through the pain, and I longed for the nails that riveted her to my consciousness to be driven yet deeper.

4337

How often have I watched, and longed to imitate when I should be free to live as I chose, a rower who had shipped his oars and lay flat on his back in the bottom of the boat, letting it drift with the current, seeing nothing but the sky gliding slowly by above him, his face aglow with a foretaste of happiness and peace!

4010

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.

4125

...we need to bear in mind that our opinion of other people, our ties with friends or family, have only the semblance of fixity and are, in fact, as eternally fluid as the sea.

1442

I came to recognise that, apart from her [Françoise's] own kinsfolk, the sufferings of humanity inspired in her a pity which increased in direct ratio to the distance separating the sufferers from herself.

3203

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

2600

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.

3335

Everything that seems imperishable tends to extinguishment.

3496

We needed germans in Paris to hear Wagner.

4012

Good God! Think of listening to Wagner for a whole fortnight with a woman who takes about as much interest in music as a tone-deaf newt - that would be fun!

2597

It was true that Odette played vilely, but often the most memorable impression of a piece of music is one that has arisen out of a jumble of wrong notes struck by unskilful fingers upon a tuneless piano.

2926

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.

4325

... the good intentions of a third party are powerless to control a woman who is annoyed to find herself pursued even into a ball-room by a man whom she does not love. Too often, the kind friend comes down again alone.

2713

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.

4143

… it would even be inexact to say that I thought of those who read it as readers of my book. Because they were not, as I saw it, my readers. More exactly they were readers of themselves, my book being a sort of magnifying glass … by which I could give them the means to read within themselves.

1963

She's got feet like boats, whiskers like an American, and her undies are filthy.

3853

The fault I find with our journalism is that it forces us to take an interest in some fresh triviality or other every day, whereas only three or four books in a lifetime give us anything that is of real importance.

1783

Real life, life finally uncovered and clarified, the only life in consequence lived to the full, is literature. Life in this sense dwells within all ordinary people as much as the artist. But they do not see it because they are not trying to shed light on it.

3638

And in myself, too, many things have perished which, I imagined, would last for ever, and new structures have arisen, giving birth to new sorrows and new joys which in those days I could not have foreseen, just as now the old are difficult of comprehension.

1341

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

2842

To such an extent does passion manifest itself in us as a temporary and distinct character, which not only takes the place of our normal character but actually obliterates the signs by which that character has hitherto been discernible.

3051

She's on the stairs, ma'am, getting her breath,' said the young servant, who had not been long up from the country, where my mother had the excellent habit of getting all her servants. Often she had seen them born. That's the only way to get really good ones. And they're the rarest of luxuries.

3456

look you, there are only two classes of men, the magnanimous, and the rest; and I have reached an age when one has to take sides, to decide once and for all whom one is going to like and dislike, to stick to the people one likes, and, to make up for the time one has wasted with the others, never to leave them again as long as one lives.

4761

But when his mistress for the time being was a woman in society, or at least one whose birth was not so lowly, nor her position is so irregular that he was unable to arrange for her reception in 'society,' then for her sake he would return to it, but only to the particular orbit in which she moved or into which he had drawn her.

2318

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

3282

... they imagine that the life they are obliged to lead is not that for which they are really fitted, and they bring to their regular occupations either a fantastic indifference or a sustained and lofty application, scornful, bitter, and conscientious.

4644

She can't have understood you: you are so utterly different from ordinary men. That's what I liked about you when I first saw you; I felt at once that you weren't like everybody else.

4659

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

3901

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.

3262

It is grief that develops the powers of the mind.

1294

We have nothing to fear and a great deal to learn from trees, that vigorours and pacific tribe which without stint produces strengthening essences for us, soothing balms, and in whose gracious company we spend so many cool, silent, and intimate hours.

4441