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The kiss, the bodily surrender which would seem natural and but moderately attractive ... By Marcel Proust
he loved sincerity, but only as he might love a pimp who could keep him in touch with the daily life of his mistress. By Marcel Proust
The person with whom we are in love is to be recognised only by the intensity of the pain that we suffer. 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
M. de Charlus made no reply and looked as if he had not heard, which was one of his favourite forms of rudeness. By 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. By Marcel Proust
My aching heart was soothed; I let myself be borne upon the current of this gentle night ... By Marcel Proust
Only by art can we get outside ourselves, instead of seeing only one world, our own, we see it under multiple forms. By Marcel Proust
All the mind's activity is easy if it is not subjected to reality. By Marcel Proust
Any mental activity is easy if it need not take reality into account. By Marcel Proust
There are optical illusions in time as well as space. By Marcel Proust
For a long time I would go to bed early.[Fr., Longtemps, je me suis couche de bonne heure.] By Marcel Proust
I have built, deep in my heart, a chapel filled with you. By Marcel Proust
To think that I wasted years of my life, that I wanted to die, that I felt my deepest love, for a woman who did not appeal to me, who was not my type! By Marcel Proust
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. By Marcel Proust
We live not alone but chained to a creature of a different kingdom: our body. By Marcel Proust
But the presence of Odette continued to sow in Swann's heart alternate seeds of love and suspicion. By 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. By Marcel Proust
One might almost say that works of literature are like artesian wells, the deeper the suffering, the higher they rise.) By 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. By Marcel Proust
Dear Friend: I have nearly died three times since morning. By Marcel Proust
An innately sensitive man who has no imagination could, nevertheless write admirable novels. By Marcel Proust
"Why did you not forget your heart also? I should never have let you have that back." ... By 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. By Marcel Proust
For, just as in the beginning it is formed by desire, so afterwards love is kept in existence only by painful anxiety. By Marcel Proust
Reading is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude. By Marcel Proust
One pretended not to know that the body of a hostess was at the disposal of all comers, provided that her visiting list showed no gaps. By 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. By Marcel Proust
A writer must not take offence when inverts give his heroines masculine faces. By Marcel Proust
A 'sadist' of her kind is an artist in evil, which a wholly wicked person could not be ... By Marcel Proust
There is in the sadist - good as he may be, indeed the better he is - a thirst for evil that malefactors cannot satisfy. By Marcel Proust
There is nothing like desire for obstructing any resemblance between what one says and what one has on one's mind. By Marcel Proust
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. By Marcel Proust
Self-centredness thus enabling every human being to see the universe spread out in descending tiers beneath himself who is its lord, By 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 ... By Marcel Proust
If there is one thing more difficult than submitting oneself to a regime it is refraining from imposing it on other people. By Marcel Proust
We remember an atmosphere because girls were smiling in it. By 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; By Marcel Proust
With women who do not love us, as with the "dear departed," the knowledge that there is no hope left does not prevent us from continuing to wait. By Marcel Proust
Pretention is very close to stupidity and that simplicity has a less visible but still gratifying aspect. By Marcel Proust
The two chief causes of error in our relations with another person are, having ourselves a good heart, or else being in love with the other person. By Marcel Proust
There can be no peace of mind in love, since what one has obtained is never anything but a new starting-point for further desires By Marcel Proust
To the pure all things are pure! By Marcel Proust
And then, gradually, the memory of her would fade away, I had forgotten the girl of my dream. By Marcel Proust
The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it ... By Marcel Proust
What barrier is so insurmountable as silence? 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
But the chain of circumstances linked up, imprisoning her, the victim of an illness that has no remedy because it has no reason. By Marcel Proust
There are people whose faces assume an unaccustomed beauty and majesty the moment they cease to look out of their eyes. By Marcel Proust
The mistakes of doctors are innumerable. They err as a rule out of optimism as to the treatment, and pessimism as to the outcome. By Marcel Proust
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? By Marcel Proust
After a certain age, the more one becomes oneself, the more obvious one's family traits become. By Marcel Proust
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. By Marcel Proust
It's far more difficult to disfigure a great work of art than to create one. By Marcel Proust
This rubicund youth, with his blunt features, appeared for all the world to have a tomato instead of a head. By Marcel Proust
A woman whom we love seldom satisfies all our needs, and we deceive her with a woman we do not love. By Marcel Proust
One cannot change, that is to say become a different person, while continuing to acquiesce to the feelings of the person one has ceased to be. By Marcel Proust
According to a charming law of nature which is evident even in the most sophisticated societies, we live in complete ignorance of whatever we love. By Marcel Proust
When you work to please others you can't succeed, but the things you do to satisfy yourself stand a chance of catching someone's interest. By Marcel Proust
Nature hardly seems capable of giving us any but quite short illnesses. But medicine has annexed to itself the art of prolonging them. By Marcel Proust
Presently, one after another, like shyly hopping sparrows, her friends arrived, black against the snow. By Marcel Proust
The nose is generally the organ in which stupidity is most readily displayed. By Marcel Proust
I spent many a charming evening talking and playing with Albertine, but none so sweet as when I was watching her sleep. By Marcel Proust
Love is space and time measured by the heart. By Marcel Proust
For a long time I used to go to bed early. By Marcel Proust
Love is not vain because it is frustrated, but because it is fulfilled. The people we love turn to ashes when we posess them. By 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. By Marcel Proust
She was capable of causing me pain, but no longer any joy. Pain alone kept my wearisome attachment alive. By Marcel Proust
Three-quarters of the sicknesses of intelligent people come from their intelligence. They need at least a doctor who can understand this sickness. By Marcel Proust
A powerful idea communicates some of its strength to him who challenges it. By 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. By Marcel Proust
But one never finds a cathedral, a wave in a storm, a dancer's leap in the air quite as high as one has been expecting; By Marcel Proust
One says the things which one feels the need to say, and which the other will not understand: one speaks for oneself alone. 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
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. By Marcel Proust
Friendship is in the end no more than: " ... a lie which seeks to make us believe that we are not irremediably alone." By Marcel Proust
I could no longer desire physically without feeling a need for her, without suffering from her absence. By Marcel Proust
How paradoxical it is to search reality for the pictures that are stored in one's memory. By Marcel Proust
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. By Marcel Proust
And continued to regard all their absurdities in the most rosy light through the admiring eyes of love. By Marcel Proust
Existence is of little interest save on days when the dust of realities is mingled with magic sand. By Marcel Proust
Sometimes in this life, under the stress of an exceptional emotion, people do say what they think. By Marcel Proust
It was the moment in which a sane man who is talking to a lunatic has not yet perceived that his companion is mad. By Marcel Proust
The social world being the realm of nullity, there exist between the merits of women in society only insignificant degrees, By Marcel Proust
Death is in truth an illness from which we recover By Marcel Proust
The young woman's smiling lips met his caresses halfway, and her eyes shone in their depths like pools warmed by the sun. By Marcel Proust
Sadness had reigned in undisputed sovereignty over his shadowed childhood. By Marcel Proust
It was impossible for me to thank my father; what he called my sentimentality would have exasperated him. By Marcel Proust
For a man cannot change, that is to say become another person, while he continues to obey the dictates of the self which he has ceased to be. By Marcel Proust
The beauty of images lies behind things, the beauty of ideas in front of them. By Marcel Proust
People don't know when they are happy. They're never so unhappy as they think they are. By Marcel Proust
Left with me were more difficult to extinguish than the memory of their original cause. By Marcel Proust
Each one of us is not a single person, but contains many persons who have not all the same moral value By Marcel Proust
Wars are fought for the benefit of oligarchs, triumphs bought with the blood of peons. By Marcel Proust
I would feel the satisfaction of being shut in from the outer world ... By Marcel Proust
But the loss of a memory, like the omission of a phrase during reading, rather than making for uncertainty, can lead to a premature certainty. By Marcel Proust
In the V-shaped opening of her crape bodice Mlle. Vinteuil felt the sting of her friend's sudden kiss; ... By Marcel Proust
One must never miss an opportunity of quoting things by others which are always more interesting than those one thinks up oneself. By 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. By Marcel Proust
Then came the deglutition of saliva, and the old lady instinctively wiped the stubble of her toothbrush moustache with her handkerchief. By Marcel Proust
Desire makes everything blossom By Marcel Proust
As a man with imagination you can enjoy only in regret or in anticipation - that is, in the past or in the future. By Marcel Proust
There is in woman something of the unconscious function of drugs which are cunning without knowing it, like morphine. By Marcel Proust
What a profound significance small things assume when the woman we love conceals them from us. By Marcel Proust
She's got feet like boats, whiskers like an American, and her undies are filthy. By Marcel Proust
The idea that 'Life' contains situations more interesting and more romantic than all the romances ever written. By Marcel Proust
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes. By Marcel Proust
Only imagination and belief can differentiate from the rest certain objects, certain people, and can create an atmosphere. By Marcel Proust
Like a swimmer who throws himself into the water in order to learn, but chooses a moment when there are not too many people to see him. By Marcel Proust
How often is not the prospect of future happiness thus sacrificed to one's impatient insistence upon an immediate gratification. By Marcel Proust
Fashions, being themselves begotten of the desire for change, are quick to change also. By Marcel Proust
It is the tragedy of other people that they are merely showcases for the very perishable collections of one's own mind. By Marcel Proust
We think and name in one world, we live and feel in another. By Marcel Proust
I felt even disappointed when he resumed the thread of his narrative. By Marcel Proust
... my body ... faithful guardian of a past which my mind should never have forgotten, brought back before my eyes .... By Marcel Proust
For theories and schools, like microbes and corpuscles, devour one another and by their strife ensure the continuity of life. By Marcel Proust
The truth I am seeking is not in the drink, but in me By Marcel Proust
They locked gazes, showing their souls on the edge of their pupils, their melancholy and passionate souls, which death was unable to unite. By Marcel Proust
For every death is a simplification of existence for the others, removes the necessity to show gratitude, the obligation to pay visits. By Marcel Proust
Attachment to an object always brings death to the possessor. By 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. 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
I experienced, suddenly, that special pleasure, which bore no resemblance to any other ... By Marcel Proust
No exile at the South Pole or on the summit of Mont Blanc separates us more effectively from others than the practice of a hidden vice. By Marcel Proust
The intellectual distinction of a house and its smartness are generally in inverse rather than direct ratio. By Marcel Proust
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. By Marcel Proust
We betroth ourselves by proxy, and then feel obliged to marry the intermediary. By Marcel Proust
We do not include the pleasures we enjoy in sleep in the inventory of the pleasures we have experienced in the course of our existence. By Marcel Proust
My destination is no longer a place, rather a new way of seeing. By Marcel Proust
The creation of the world did not occur at the beginning of time, it occurs every day. By Marcel Proust
You cannot be surprised at anything men do, they're such brutes. By Marcel Proust
We do not succeed in changing things according to our desire, but gradually our desire changes. By 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. By Marcel Proust
Time passes, and little by little everything that we have spoken in falsehood becomes true. By Marcel Proust
And so it is with things that we shall later love the most. We meet them first as strangers who give us only a feeling of surprise. By Marcel Proust
After luncheon the sun, conscious that it was Saturday, would blaze an hour longer in the zenith, ... By Marcel Proust
We do not tremble except for ourselves, or for those whom we love. By Marcel Proust
There is not a woman in the world the possession of whom is as precious as that of the truths which she reveals to us by causing us to suffer. By Marcel Proust
And in love, it is easier to relinquish a feeling than to give up a habit. By Marcel Proust
Gardeners produce flowers that are delicious dreams, and others too that are like nightmares. By Marcel Proust
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. By Marcel Proust
Let us be grateful to people whomake us happy; they are thecharming gardeners who make oursouls bloom. By Marcel Proust
Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom. By Marcel Proust
The most familiar precepts are not always the truest. By Marcel Proust
Perfume is that last and best reserve of the past, the one which when all out tears have run dry, can make us cry again! By Marcel Proust
To have a kind heart is everything By Marcel Proust
An hour is not merely an hour; it is a vase full of scents and sounds and projects and climates. By Marcel Proust
You're as strong as the Pont Neuf. You'll live to bury us all! By Marcel Proust
Beautiful books are always written in a sort of foreign language. By Marcel Proust
... with a quiet suggestion of infinity... By Marcel Proust
A work in which there are theories is like an object which still has its price-tag on. By 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. By Marcel Proust
The true voyage of discovery is not a journey to a new place; it is learning to see with new eyes. 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
With intelligent people, three-quarters of the things they suffer from come from their intelligence. By Marcel Proust
When from a long distant past nothing subsists after the things are broken and scattered, the smell and taste of things remain. By Marcel Proust
To a person who loves, is not absence the most certain, the most effective, the most durable, the most indestructible, the most faithful of presences? By Marcel Proust
Only that issues from ourselves which we ourselves extract from the darkness within ourselves and which is unknown to others. By Marcel Proust
Quite half of the human race was in tears. By Marcel Proust
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. By Marcel Proust
Until it had acquired the strength to create in my mind a fresh example of absolute, unproductive beauty ... By Marcel Proust
The true paradises are the paradises that we have lost. By Marcel Proust
All the great things we know have come to us from neurotics. It is they who have founded religions and created great works of art. By Marcel Proust
Fall in love with a dog's bum,And thou'll think it pretty as a plum. By Marcel Proust
The anaesthetic effect of habit being destroyed, I would begin to think - and to feel - such melancholy things. By Marcel Proust
Just as those who practice the same profession recognize each other instinctively, so do those who practice the same vice. By Marcel Proust
As soon as jealousy is discovered, it is regarded by the person who is its object as a challenge which justifies deception. By Marcel Proust
Often it is just lack of imagination that keeps a man from suffering very much. By Marcel Proust
since she would never have practised the cult of these things, she would take no impious delight in their profanation. By Marcel Proust
Ideas are substitutes for sorrows... By Marcel Proust
The habit of thinking prevents us at times from experiencing reality, immunises us against it, makes it seem no more than any other thought. By Marcel Proust
My dear," she had said to Mamma, "I could not bring myself to give the child anything that was not well written, By Marcel Proust
Error, by force of contrast, enhances the triumph of Truth ... By Marcel Proust
But sometimes the future is latent in us without our knowing it, and our supposedly lying words foreshadow an imminent reality. By Marcel Proust
Only that which is absent can be imagined. By Marcel Proust
We ought not to attach ourselves to beings, it is not beings who exist in reality and are amenable to description, but ideas. By Marcel Proust
in all countries fools outnumber the rest; By Marcel Proust
A change in the weather is sufficient to recreate the world and ourselves. By Marcel Proust
We needed germans in Paris to hear Wagner. By Marcel Proust
Proust was the greatest novelist of the twentieth century, just as Tolstoy was in the nineteenth. By Marcel Proust
Desire makes everything blossom; possession makes everything wither and fade. By Marcel Proust
I would lay my cheeks gently against the comfortable cheeks of my pillow, as plump and blooming as the cheeks of babyhood. By Marcel Proust
How else learn the real, if not by inventing what might lie outside it? By Marcel Proust
Sterile, splendid torture of understanding and loving ... By Marcel Proust
Memory nourishes the heart, and grief abates. By Marcel Proust
The breath of the enchanted wind mingles the fresh scent of the lilacs with the fragrance of the past. By Marcel Proust
As profession recognizes profession, so, too, does vice. By Marcel Proust
The only thing that does not change is that at any and every time it appears that there have been great changes. By 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. By Marcel Proust
I was not unhappy, except one day at a time. By Marcel Proust
For the possession of what we love is an even greater joy than love itself. By Marcel Proust
Real books should be the offspring not of daylight and casual talk but of darkness and silence By Marcel Proust
Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were. By Marcel Proust
We remember the truth because it has a name, is rooted in the past, but a makeshift lie is quickly forgotten. By 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. By Marcel Proust
The path that he followed being fixed for ever in his memory by the general excitement due to being in a strange place, to doing unusual things, By Marcel Proust
It is our noticing them that puts things in a room, our growing used to them that takes them away again and clears a space for us. By Marcel Proust
She wept over the vanity of her desires, which had so ardently flown to the blossoming flesh that now had already withered forever. By Marcel Proust
There was nothing abnormal about it when homosexuality was the norm. By Marcel Proust
So few are the easy victories as the ultimate failures. By Marcel Proust
Hence one meets in polite society few novelists, or poets, few of all those sublime creatures who speak of the things that are not to be mentioned. By Marcel Proust
The satisfaction an imbecile derives from having right on his side and being certain of success is especially irritating. By Marcel Proust
Like an entirely cloudless sky when one is going mountaineering ... By Marcel Proust
That distant look characteristic of people who do not wish to be agreeable ... By Marcel Proust
When I am not too sad to listen, music is my consolation. By Marcel Proust
Time, which changes people, does not alter the image we have of them. By Marcel Proust
Less disappointing than life, great works of art do not begin by giving us all their best. By Marcel Proust
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. By Marcel Proust
The one thing more difficult than following a regimen is not imposing it on others. By Marcel Proust
The courage of one's opinions is always a form of calculating cowardice in the eyes of the 'other side' ... By Marcel Proust
There are few who are worthy to understand what I feel. [...] I seek out those who are of this chosen few, and I avoid the rest. By Marcel Proust
The past not merely is not fugitive, it remains present. By Marcel Proust
The most exclusive love for a person is always a love for something else. By Marcel Proust
Homosexuals would be the best husbands in the world if they did not put on an act of loving other women. By Marcel Proust
Those whose suffering is due to love are, as we say of certain invalids, their own physicians. By Marcel Proust
Love ... , ever unsatisfied, lives always in the moment that is about to come. By Marcel Proust
Masterpieces are no more than the shipwrecked flotsam of great minds. By Marcel Proust
A little insomnia is not without its value in making us appreciate sleep, in throwing a ray of light upon that darkness. By Marcel Proust
Imagination, thought, may be admirable mechanisms but they can also be inert. Suffering alone sets them going. By Marcel Proust
How could all this fresh water of memories have spurted once again and flowed through my impure soul of today without getting soiled? By Marcel Proust
Your soul is a dark forest. But the trees are of a particular species, they are genealogical trees. By Marcel Proust
My body, still too heavy with sleep to move... By Marcel Proust
Things don't change, but by and by our wishes change. By Marcel Proust
People can have many different kinds of pleasure. The real one is that for which they will forsake the others. By Marcel Proust
The charms of the passing woman are generally in direct proportion to the swiftness of her passing. By Marcel Proust
We may talk for a lifetime without doing more than indefinitely repeat the vacuity of a minute. By Marcel Proust
I felt myself still reliving a past which was no longer anything more than the history of another person; By Marcel Proust
We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full. By Marcel Proust
The sad work of a true artist speaks to us in that tone of people who have suffered, who force anyone who has suffered to drop everything and listen. By Marcel Proust
We forgive the crimes of individuals, but not their participation in a collective crime. By Marcel Proust
It comes so soon, the moment when there is nothing left to wait for. By Marcel Proust
And so when studying faces, we do indeed measure them, but as painters, not as surveyors. By Marcel Proust
Desiring a will was not enough. I would have needed precisely what I could not have without willpower: a will. By Marcel Proust
Monsieur Beulier never engaged in thought except to speak the truth, and never spoke except to express his thought. By Marcel Proust
We are very slow to recognise in the peculiar physiognomy of a new writer the model which is labelled "great talent" in our museum of general ideas. By Marcel Proust
Ah! there is a man who justifies the wit who insisted that one ought never to know an author except through his books. By Marcel Proust
At the heart of our friendly or purely social relations, there lurks a hostility momentarily cured but recurring by fits and starts. By Marcel Proust
Our passions shape our books, repose writes them in the intervals. By Marcel Proust
A doctor who doesn't say too many foolish things is a patient half-cured. By Marcel Proust
Like many intellectuals, he was incapable of saying a simple thing in a simple way By Marcel Proust
Her eyes seemed to promise a spirit forever capsized in the diseased waters of regret. By Marcel Proust
In love, happiness is an abnormal state. By 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. By Marcel Proust
breathed into this quite ordinary prose a kind of life, continuous and full of feeling. My By Marcel Proust
always wrapped in the mystery of the Merovingian age, By Marcel Proust
No man is a complete mystery except to himself. By Marcel Proust
Men may thus have several sorts of pleasures. The true pleasure is that for which they give up another. By Marcel Proust
Our intonations contain our philosophy of life, what each of us is constantly telling himself about things. By Marcel Proust
I never much like thus being told without possibility of reply what I am to think about people whom I know. By Marcel Proust
He turned his head to avoid seeing the happy tableau of pleasures that he had passionately loved and that he would never enjoy again. By Marcel Proust
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. By Marcel Proust
To see how pretty an old woman once was, it is not enough just to look at each feature; they must be translated. By Marcel Proust
I should have been happy: I wasn't. By Marcel Proust
Love, and consequently fear, of the crowd being one of the most powerful motives in all human beings ... By Marcel Proust
I must choose to cease from suffering or to cease from loving. By Marcel Proust
The comfort of reclusion, the poetry of hibernation By Marcel Proust
We are at times too ready to believe that the present is the only possible state of things. By Marcel Proust
Love is a striking example of how little reality means to us. By Marcel Proust
Whose inferiority proclaimed her own supremacy so loud ... By Marcel Proust
Griefs, at the moment when they change into ideas, lose some of their power to injure our heart. By Marcel Proust
that indifference to the sufferings which they cause which, whatever names else be given it, is the one true, terrible and lasting form of cruelty. If By Marcel Proust
Love is a reciprocal torture. By Marcel Proust
We see things but we don't see them, like things that slid through the mind, one flowing into another. By Marcel Proust
A picture's beauty does not depend on the things portrayed in it. By Marcel Proust
Laissons les jolies femmes aux hommes sans imagination. Leave the pretty women for the men without imagination. By Marcel Proust
Adultery breathes new life into marriages which have been left for dead. By Marcel Proust
To be an artist is to fail, as no other dare to fail ... failure is his world and the shrink from it desertion By Marcel Proust
I have a horror of sunsets; they're so romantic, so operatic. By Marcel Proust
The best vaccine against anger is to watch others in its throes. By Marcel Proust
That form of the instinct of self-preservation with which we guard everything that is best in ourselves ... By Marcel Proust
With graceful deviations in which caprice is blended with virtuosity By Marcel Proust
Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind. By Marcel Proust
Dinner-parties bore us because our imagination is absent, and reading interests us because it is keeping us company. By Marcel Proust
That translucent alabaster of our memories. By Marcel Proust
The fixity of a habit is generally in direct proportion to its absurdity. By Marcel Proust
Because happiness alone is good for the body; whereas sorrow develops the strength of the mind. By Marcel Proust
What artists call posterity is the posterity of the work of art. By Marcel Proust
in the state of mind in which we "observe" we are a long way below the level to which we rise when we create. There was, then, embedded in my By Marcel Proust
This book of mine has not been manufactured: it has been garnered. By Marcel Proust
Illness is the most heeded of doctors: to kindness and wisdom we make promises only; pain we obey. By Marcel Proust
The heart does not lie. By Marcel Proust
Always try to keep a patch of sky above your life. By Marcel Proust
An impression of love is out of proportion to the other impressions of life, but when it is lost in their midst we are incapable of appreciating it. By Marcel Proust
His nature was really like a sheet of paper that has been folded so often in every direction that it is impossible to straighten it out. By Marcel Proust
True life life at last discovered and illuminated the only life therefore really lived that life is literature. By Marcel Proust
The loss of a sense adds as much beauty to the world as its acquisition. 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
For instinct dictates our duty and the intellect supplies us with pretexts for evading it. By Marcel Proust
Let us leave pretty women to men devoid of imagination. By Marcel Proust
The highest praise of God consists in the denial of him by the atheist who finds creation so perfect that it can dispense with a creator. By Marcel Proust
There are optical errors in time as there are in space. By Marcel Proust
We can only be faithful to what we remember, and we remember only what we have known. By Marcel Proust
Most of our faculties lie dormant because they can rely upon Habit, which knows what there is to be done and has no need of their services. By Marcel Proust
A man of letters, merely by reading a phrase, can estimate exactly the literary merit of its author. By Marcel Proust
The particulars of life do not matter to the artist; they merely provide him with the opportunity to lay bare his genius. By Marcel Proust
What had to move - a leaf of the chestnut tree, for instance - moved. By Marcel Proust
In my cowardice I became at once a man, and did what all we grown men do when face to face with suffering and injustice; I preferred not to see them By Marcel Proust
Happiness is good for the body, but it is grief which develops the strengths of the mind. By Marcel Proust
Washed clean like a porcelain, with housewifely care ... By Marcel Proust
All our final decisions are made in a state of mind that is not going to last. By Marcel Proust
The duty and the task of a writer are those of an interpreter. 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
Combray, we used often to invite him to our house. By Marcel Proust
Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and composed our masterpieces. By Marcel Proust
Happiness serves hardly any other purpose than to make unhappiness possible. By Marcel Proust
That profit which good things bestowed on us by teaching to seek pleasure elsewhere than in the barren satisfaction of worldly wealth. By Marcel Proust
The only true paradise is paradise lost By Marcel Proust
Prosperity of wicked men runs like a torrent past, and soon is spent. By Marcel Proust
The truth is that men can have several sorts of pleasure. The true pleasure is the one for which they abandon the other. By Marcel Proust
Everything great in the world is done by neurotics; they alone founded our religions and created our masterpieces. By Marcel Proust
She was "a woman of uncertain age. By Marcel Proust
For each of us sees clarity only in those ideas which have the same degree of confusion as his own. By Marcel Proust
There is no idea that does not carry in itself a possible refutation, no word that does not imply its opposite. By Marcel Proust
Pretentiousness is closely allied to stupidity and that simplicity has a subtle but agreeable flavour. By Marcel Proust
In most women's lives, everything, even the greatest sorrow, comes down to a question of 'I haven't got a thing to wear'. By Marcel Proust
It is often hard to bear the tears that we ourselves have caused. By Marcel Proust
People wish to learn to swim and at the same time to keep one foot on the ground. By Marcel Proust
There is no doubt that a person's charms are less frequently a cause of love than a remark such as: 'No, this evening I shan't be free'. By 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. By Marcel Proust
Rejoicing in a peace which brings only an increase of anxiety, ... By Marcel Proust
As soon as one is unhappy one becomes moral. By Marcel Proust
It is always during a passing state of mind that we make lasting resolutions. By Marcel Proust
How much farther does anguish penetrate in psychology than psychology itself! By Marcel Proust
For every sin there is forgiveness, and especially for the sins of youth. By Marcel Proust
Even though our lives wander, our memories remain in one place. By Marcel Proust
Love is space and time made perceptible to the heart. 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
The charms of a passing woman are usually in direct relation to the speed of her passing. By Marcel Proust
If only for the sake of elegance, I try to remain morally pure. By Marcel Proust
The smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us ... By Marcel Proust
when the fortress of the body is besieged on all sides the mind must at length succumb. By Marcel Proust
The theatre of the world is stocked with fewer settings than actors, and with fewer actors than situations. By Marcel Proust
Then it would begin to seem unintelligible, as the thoughts of a former existence must be to a reincarnate spirit By Marcel Proust
So what I had believed to be nothing to me was simply my entire life. How ignorant one is of oneself. By Marcel Proust
As with the future, it is not all at once but grain by grain that one savours the past. By Marcel Proust
L'adolescence est le seul temps o u' l'on ait appris quelque chose. Adolescence is the only time when we can learn something. By Marcel Proust
The objects which we admire have no absolute value in themselves ... By Marcel Proust
From the moment when they were in love, it was superfluous to obey them, since they would only be more in love later on. By Marcel Proust
We love only what we do not wholly possess. By Marcel Proust
It is often simply from lack of creative imagination that we do not go far enough in suffering. By Marcel Proust
could still believe in their possible presence; for memory was now set in motion; By Marcel Proust
We are all of us obliged, if we are to make reality endurable, to nurse a few little follies in ourselves. By Marcel Proust
... novels contained something inexpressibly delicious. By Marcel Proust
Let a prize lower my position, if it causes me to be read; that I prefer immediately to all the honors. By Marcel Proust
And if she had appeared, would I have dared to speak to her? By Marcel Proust
People are not always very tolerant of the tears which they themselves have provoked. By Marcel Proust
For with the perturbations of memory are linked the intermittencies of the heart. By Marcel Proust
Reality is never more than a first step towards an unknown on the road to which one can never progress very far. By Marcel Proust
The human plagiarism which is most difficult to avoid, for individuals ... is the plagiarism of ourselves. By Marcel Proust
The stellar universe is not so difficult of comprehension as the real actions of other people. By Marcel Proust
Habit is a second nature which prevents us from knowing the first, of which it has neither the cruelties nor the enchantments. By Marcel Proust
Her memory was a burning pillow which she kept turning and turning. By Marcel Proust
Unfortunately my parents had recourse to principles entirely different from those which I suggested they should adopt By Marcel Proust
He sat there silent, watching their love expire. By Marcel Proust
Life is strewn with these miracles for which people who love can always hope. By Marcel Proust
We must never be afraid to go too far, for truth lies beyond. By Marcel Proust
Discovery consists not in seeking new lands, but in seeing with new eyes. By Marcel Proust
but whenever I thought about them I pictured them to myself either in tapestry, as was the 'Coronation of Esther' which hung in our church, By Marcel Proust
She was not yet dead. But I was already alone. By Marcel Proust
The time at our disposal each day is elastic; the passions we feel dilate it, those that inspire us shrink it, and habit fills it. By Marcel Proust
For in order to really suffer at the hands of a woman one must have believed in her completely. By Marcel Proust
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. By Marcel Proust
the sweetness to be found in generosity By Marcel Proust
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. By Marcel Proust
Human altruism which is not egoism, is sterile. By Marcel Proust
The hope of being relieved gives him the courage to suffer. By Marcel Proust
Mystery is not about traveling to new places but about looking with new eyes. By Marcel Proust
The only possible paradises are those we have lost By Marcel Proust
The bonds that unite another person to our self exist only in our mind. By Marcel Proust
In reality, every reader is, while reading, the reader of his own self. By Marcel Proust
A constant repetition and a boundless incongruity of useless but indestructible objects. By Marcel Proust
Photography is the product of complete alienation. By Marcel Proust
Were it not for habit, life would seem delightful to beings constantly under threat of dying, in other words to all humankind. By Marcel Proust
Until custom had changed the colour of the curtains, made the clock keep quiet, brought By Marcel Proust
We consider it innocent to desire, and heinous that the other person should do so. By Marcel Proust
An artist, however modest, is always willing to hear himself preferred to his rivals, and tries only to see that justice is done them. By Marcel Proust
A work should convey its entire meaning by itself, imposing it on the spectator even before he knows what the subject is. By Marcel Proust
We become moral when we are unhappy. 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
One wants to be understood because one wants to be loved, and one wants to be loved because one loves. By Marcel Proust
With one image he would make that beauty explode into me. By Marcel Proust
A language which we do not know is a fortress sealed. By 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. By Marcel Proust
I wished to see storms only on those coasts where they raged with most violence ... By Marcel Proust
Our shadows, now parallel, now close together and joined, traced an exquisite pattern at our feet. By Marcel Proust
Those who have minds have no regard for birth. By Marcel Proust
To determine not to think of it was but to think of it still, to suffer from it still. By Marcel Proust
It has been said that beauty is a promise of happiness. Conversely, the possibility of pleasure can be a beginning of beauty. By Marcel Proust
It is not only by dint of lying to others, but also of lying to ourselves, that we cease to notice that we are lying. By Marcel Proust
The tiny, initial clue ... by allowing us to imagine what we do not know, stimulates a desire for knowledge. By Marcel Proust
They like my books better in England than in France; a translation would be very successful there. By Marcel Proust
Everything that seems imperishable tends to extinguishment. By Marcel Proust
Only through art can we emerge from ourselves and know what another person sees. By Marcel Proust
as the saying is, climbing in opposition to my By Marcel Proust
Let us leave pretty women to men with no imagination. By Marcel Proust
So beautiful that he could not refrain from moving his lips towards her ... 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
The universe is true for us all and dissimilar to each of us. By Marcel Proust
Each of us is indeed alone. By Marcel Proust
the remembrence of things past is not nessecarly the remeberance of things as they were By Marcel Proust
I live so resolutely apart from physical contingencies that my senses no longer trouble to inform me of them. By Marcel Proust
She lived her life, but I may have been the only one to dream it. By Marcel Proust
Under each station of the real, another glimmers. By Marcel Proust
The only paradise is paradise lost. By Marcel Proust
What most enraptured me were the asparagus. By Marcel Proust
Lies are essential to humanity. By Marcel Proust
Instead of seeking new landscapes, develop new eyes. By Marcel Proust
When I went to Venice I found that my dream had become-incredibly, but quite simply-my address. By Marcel Proust
So difficult is it for us to know, with the dead as with the living, whether a thing would cause them joy or sorrow! By Marcel Proust
Truth is a point of view about things. By Marcel Proust
One can seldom admire what one loves. By Marcel Proust
My house contains every useless thing in the world. it lacks only the one essential, a piece of sky like this one ... By Marcel Proust
It is always thus, impelled by a state of mind which is destined not to last, we make our irrevocable decisions By Marcel Proust
The memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment.. By Marcel Proust
... in my spell of uncertainty as to where I was... By Marcel Proust
The most powerful soporific is sleep itself. By Marcel Proust
The thought of being made comfortable gives him strength to endure his pain. By Marcel Proust
You can't learn the truth about a man's intentions by asking him. By Marcel Proust
I was poised on its dizzy summit, By Marcel Proust
Happiness is salutary for the body but sorrow develops the powers of the spirit. By Marcel Proust
One becomes moral as soon as one is unhappy. By Marcel Proust
