Marcel Proust Quotes
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You can't learn the truth about a man's intentions by asking him.
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A sleeping man holds in a circle around him the thread of the hours, the order of years and of worlds. He consults them instinctively upon awaking and in one second reads in them the point of the earth that he occupies, the time past until his arousal; but their ranks can be mingled or broken.
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Lies are essential to humanity.
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We say that we often see animals in our dreams, but we forget that almost always we are ourselves animals therein, deprived of that reasoning power which projects upon things the light of certainty; on the contrary we bring to bear on the spectacle of life only a dubious vision, extinguished anew every moment by oblivion, the former reality fading before that which follows it as one projection of a magic lantern fades before the next as we change the slide.
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For, just as in the beginning it is formed by desire, so afterwards love is kept in existence only by painful anxiety.
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Wars are fought for the benefit of oligarchs, triumphs bought with the blood of peons.
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Let us be grateful to people who make us happy, they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.
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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.
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There are people whose faces assume an unaccustomed beauty and majesty the moment they cease to look out of their eyes.
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Reality is never more than a first step towards an unknown on the road to which one can never progress very far.
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Even the simple act that we call "going to visit a person of our acquaintance" is in part an intellectual act. We fill the physical appearance of the person we see with all the notions we have about him, and in the totality of our impressions about him, these notions play the most important role.
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We think and name in one world, we live and feel in another.
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Life is extraordinarily suave and sweet with certain natural, witty, affectionate people who have unusual distinction and are capable of every vice, but who make a display of none in public and about whom no one can affirm they have a single one. There is something supple and secret about them. Besides, their perversity gives spice to their most innocent occupations, such as taking a walk in the garden at night.
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Everybody calls "clear" those ideas which have the same degree of confusion as his own.
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There comes in all our lives a time ... when the ears can listen to no music save what the moonlight breathes through the flute of silence.
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We live not alone but chained to a creature of a different kingdom: our body.
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The fixity of a habit is generally in direct proportion to its absurdity.
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... we made much less happy by the kindness of a great writer, which strictly speaking we find only in his books, than we suffer from the hostility of a woman whom we have not chosen for her intelligence, but whom we cannot stop ourselves from loving.
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A person does not...stand motionless and clear before our eyes with his merits, his defects, his plans, his intentions with regard to ourself exposed on his surface...but is a shadow which we can never succeed in penetrating...a shadow behind which we can alternately imagine, with equal justification, that there burns the flame of hatred and of love.
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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.
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May you always see a blue sky overhead, my young friend; and then, even when the time comes, as it has come for me now, when the woods are black, when night is fast falling, you will be able to console yourself, as I do, by looking up at the sky.
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Error, by force of contrast, enhances the triumph of Truth.
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There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book.
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A little insomnia is not without its value in making us appreciate sleep, in throwing a ray of light upon that darkness.