Top 434 Quotes & Sayings by Marcel Proust - Page 3

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

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

There are optical illusions in time as well as space.

Death is in truth an illness from which we recover

We see things but we don't see them, like things that slid through the mind, one flowing into another.

If there is one thing more difficult than submitting oneself to a regime it is refraining from imposing it on other people.

Le temps qui change les e" tres ne modifie pas l'image que nous avons garde e d'eux. Although time changes people, it cannot change the image we have already made of them.

Many years have passed since that night. The wall of the staircase up which I had watched the light of his candle gradually climb was long ago demolished. And in myself, too, many things have perished which I imagined would last for ever, and new ones 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 hard to understand.

It has been said that beauty is a promise of happiness. Conversely, the possibility of pleasure can be a beginning of beauty.

Pleasures are like photographs: in the presence of the person we love, we take only negatives, which we develop later, at home, when we have at our disposal once more our inner dark room, the door of which it is strictly forbidden to open while others are present.

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

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

...the nose is generally the organ in which stupidity is most readily displayed.

After a certain age, the more one becomes oneself, the more obvious one's family traits become.

Truth is a point of view about things.

How else learn the real, if not by inventing what might lie outside it?

A certain similarity exists, although the type evolves, between all the women we love, a similarity that is due to the fixity of our own temperament, which it is that chooses them, eliminating all those who would not be at once our opposite and our complement, fitted that is to say to gratify our senses and to wring our heart.

The places we have known do not belong solely to the world of space in which we situate them for our greater convenience. They were only a thin slice among contiguous impressions which formed our life at that time; the memory of a certain image is but regret for a certain moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fleeting, alas, as the years.

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.

Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself. The writer's work is only a kind of optical instrument he provides the reader so he can discern what he might never have seen in himself without this book. The reader's recognition in himself of what the book says is the proof of the book's truth.

For although we know that the years pass, that youth gives way to old age, that fortunes and thrones crumble (even the most solid among them) and that fame is transitory, the manner in which—by means of a sort of snapshot—we take cognisance of this moving universe whirled along by Time, has the contrary effect of immobilising it.

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

People don't know when they are happy. They're never so unhappy as they think they are.

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.

There are mountainous, arduous days, up which one takes an infinite time to climb, and downward-sloping days which one can descend at full tilt, singing as one goes.

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

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

Memory nourishes the heart, and grief abates.

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

Thanks to art, instead of seeing one world only, our own, we see that world multiply itself and we have at our disposal as many worlds as there are original artists, worlds more different one from the other than those which revolve in infinite space, worlds which, centuries after the extinction of the fire from which their light first emanated, whether it is called Rembrandt or Vermeer, send us still each one its special radiance.

It is always thus, impelled by a state of mind which is destined not to last, we make our irrevocable decisions

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

I wished to see storms only on those coasts where they raged with most violence.

For women who do not love us, as for the "disappeared", knowing that we no longer have any hope does not prevent us form continuing to wait. We live on our guard, on watch; women whose son has gone asea on a dangerous exploration imagine at any minute, although it has long been certain that he has perished, that he will enter, miraculously saved, and healthy.

Under each station of the real, another glimmers.

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.

A man of letters, merely by reading a phrase, can estimate exactly the literary merit of its author.

Laissons les jolies femmes aux hommes sans imagination. Leave the pretty women for the men without imagination.

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

But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.

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.

The only true voyage of discovery, . . . would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes.

with one image he would make that beauty explode into me.

The duty and the task of a writer are those of an interpreter.

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

A little insomnia is not without its value in making us appreciate sleep, in throwing a ray of light upon that darkness.

To be an artist is to fail, as no other dare to fail... failure is his world and the shrink from it desertion

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

The most familiar precepts are not always the truest.

Even from the simplest, the most realistic point of view, the countries which we long for occupy, at any given moment, a far larger place in our actual life than the country in which we happen to be.

For what we suppose to be our love or our jealousy is never a single, continuous and indivisible passion. It is composed of an infinity of successive loves, of different jealousies, each of which is ephemeral, although by their uninterrupted multiplicity they give us the impression of continuity, the illusion of unity.

For every sin there is forgiveness, and especially for the sins of youth.

A work in which there are theories is like an object which still has the ticket that shows its price.

The one thing more difficult than following a regime is keeping from imposing it on others.

Everybody calls "clear" those ideas which have the same degree of confusion as his own.

She was "a woman of uncertain age.

I do my intellectual work inside myself, and once I am with my fellow creatures it is more or less a matter of indifference to me whether or not they are intelligent as long as they are kind, sincere, etc.

One reads the papers as one wants to with a bandage over one's eyes without trying to understand the facts, listening to the soothing words of the editor as to the words of one s mistress.

After a certain age our memories are so intertwined with one another that what we are thinking of, the book we are reading, scarcely matters any more. We have put something of ourselves everywhere, everything is fertile, everything is dangerous, and we can make discoveries no less precious than in Pascal's Pensées in an advertisement for soap.

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.