Marcel Proust Quotes
Love is a reciprocal torture.
We become moral when we are unhappy.
Always try to keep a patch of sky above your life.
Let us leave pretty women to men devoid of imagination.
We must never be afraid to go too far, for truth lies beyond.
Love is a striking example of how little reality means to us.
A change in the weather is sufficient to recreate the world and ourselves.
We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full.
The regularity of a habit is generally in proportion to its absurdity.
It comes so soon, the moment when there is nothing left to wait for.
Desire makes everything blossom; possession makes everything wither and fade.
Happiness serves hardly any other purpose than to make unhappiness possible.
We must all, in order to make reality more tolerable, keep alive in us a few little follies.
Let us be grateful to people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.
There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book.
It is not because other people are dead that our affection for them grows faint, it is because we ourselves are dying.
Through art alone are we able to emerge from ourselves, to know what another person sees.
Illness is the doctor to whom we pay most heed; to kindness, to knowledge, we make promise only; pain we obey.
It is always thus, impelled by a state of mind which is destined not to last, that we make our irrevocable decisions./dt>
Three-quarters of the sicknesses of intelligent people come from their intelligence. They need at least a doctor who can understand this sickness.
We construct our life for one person and, when finally we are ready to receive that person in our life, she does not come, then dies in our eyes and we live as prisoners of that which was meant only for her.
It is up to my spirit to find the truth. But how? Grave uncertainty, each time the spirit feels beyond its own comprehension; when it, the explorer, is altogether to obscure land that it must search and where all its baggage is of no use. To search? That is not all: to create.
I was left alone there in the company of the orchids, roses and violets, which, like people waiting beside you who do not know you, preserved a silence which their individuality as living things made all the more striking, and warmed themselves in the heat of a glowing coal fire...
Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and composed our masterpieces.
We do not succeed in changing things according to our desire, but gradually our desire changes.
The only true voyage of discovery, the only fountain of Eternal Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to behold the hundred universes that each of them beholds, that each of them is.
A powerful idea communicates some of its strength to him who challenges it.
The thirst for something other than what we have…to bring something new, even if it is worse, some emotion, some sorrow; when our sensibility, which happiness has silenced like an idle harp, wants to resonate under some hand, even a rough one, and even if it might be broken by it.
But sometimes illumination comes to our rescue at the very moment when all seems lost; we have knocked at every door and they open on nothing until, at last, we stumble unconsciously against the only one through which we can enter the kingdom we have sought in vain a hundred years - and it opens.
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.
There is probably not one person, however great his virtue, who cannot be led by the complexities of life's circumstances to a familiarity with the vices he condemns the most vehemently - without his completely recognizing this vice which, disguised as certain events, touches him and wounds him: strange words, an inexplicable attitude, on a given night, of the person whom he otherwise has so many reasons to love.
The places we have known do not only belong to the world of space in which we situate them for the sake of simplicity. They were but a thin slice between contiguous impression which formed our lives back then; the memory of a certain image is but the regret of a certain instant; and the houses, the roads, the avenues are fleeting, alas! as the years.
In love, barriers cannot be destroyed from the outside by the one to whom the cause despair, no matter what he does; and it is only when he is no longer concerned with them that, suddenly, as a result of work coming from elsewhere, accomplished within the one who did not love him, these barriers, formerly attacked without success, fall futilely.
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.
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 thoughts where we may dispose of them at our whim, which gives us the illusion of power over them.
In a separation it is the one who is not really in love who says the more tender things.
Happiness is beneficial for the body but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.
If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time.
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.
Time passes, and little by little everything that we have spoken in falsehood becomes true.
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 notions related to the dream, are nothing too. We will die, but our hostages are the divine captives who will follow our chance. And death with them is somewhat less bitter, less inglorious, perhaps less probable.
I believe that reading, in its original essence, in that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.
Like many intellectuals, he was incapable of saying a simple thing in a simple way.
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.
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.
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.
In his younger days a man dreams of possessing the heart of the woman whom he loves; later, the feeling that he possesses the heart of a woman may be enough to make him fall in love with her.
When we are in love, the sentiment is too great to be contained whole within us; it radiates out to our beloved, finds in her a surface which stops it, forces it to return to its point of departure, and it is this rebound of our own tenderness which we call the other's affection and which charms us more than when it first went out because we do not see that it comes from us.
We have nothing to fear and a great deal to learn from trees, that vigorous 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.
The bonds that unite another person to ourself 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.
I knew very well that this hope was chimerical. I was like a pauper who mingles fewer tears with his dry bread if he tells himself that at any moment a stranger will bequeath to him his fortune. We must all, in order to make reality more tolerable, keep alive in us a few little follies.
But, when nothing subsists from a distant past, after the death of others, after the destruction of objects, only the senses of smell and taste, weaker but more enduring, more intangible, more persistent, more faithful, continue for a long time, like souls, to remember, to wait, to hope, on the ruins of all the rest, to bring without flinching, on their nearly impalpable droplet, the immense edifice of memory.
By art alone we are able to get outside ourselves, to know what another sees of this universe which for him is not ours, the landscapes of which would remain as unknown to us as those of the moon. Thanks to art, instead of seeing one world, our own, we see it multiplied and as many original artists as there are, so many worlds are at our disposal, differing more widely from each other than those which roll round the infinite and which, whether their name be Rembrandt or Ver Meer, send us their unique rays many centuries after the hearth from which they emanate is extinguished.
This labour of the artist to discover a means of apprehending beneath matter and experience, beneath words, something different from their appearance, is of an exactly contrary nature to the operation in which pride, passion, intelligence and habit are constantly engaged within us when we spend our lives without self-communion, accumulating as though to hide our true impressions, the terminology for practical ends which we falsely call life.
We are not provided with wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can take for us, an effort which no one can spare us.
We do not succeed in changing things according to our desire, but gradually our desire changes. The situation that we hoped to change because it was intolerable becomes unimportant. We have not managed to surmount the obstacle, as we were absolutely determined to do, but life has taken us round it, led us past it, and then if we turn round to gaze at the remote past, we can barely catch sight of it, so imperceptible has it become.
We passionately long that there may be another life in which we shall be similar to what we are here below. But we do not pause to reflect that, even without waiting for that other life, in this life, after a few years we are unfaithful to what we have been, to what we wished to remain immortally.
A woman is of greater service to our life if she is in it, instead of being an element of happiness, an instrument of sorrow, and 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.
It is comforting when one has a sorrow to lie in the warmth of one's bed and there, abandoning all effort and all resistance, to bury even one's head under the cover, giving one's self up to it completely, moaning like branches in the autumn wind. But there is still a better bed, full of divine odors. It is our sweet, our profound, our impenetrable friendship.
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.
