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Kind hearts are the garden, kind thoughts are the roots, kind words are the blossoms, kind deeds are the fruit.
Marcel Proust -
Time, which changes people, does not alter the image we have retained of them.
Marcel Proust
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When a belief vanishes, there survives it -- more and more vigorously so as to cloak the absence of the power, now lost to us, of imparting reality to new things -- a fetishistic attachment to the old things which it did once animate, as if it was in them and not in ourselves that the divine spark resided, and as if our present incredulity had a contingent cause -- the death of the gods.
Marcel Proust -
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.
Marcel Proust -
We exist only by virtue of what we possess, we possess only what is really present to us, and many of our memories, our moods, our ideas sail away on a voyage of their own until they are lost to sight! Then we can no longer take them into account in the total which is our personality. But they know of secret paths by which to return to us.
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.
Marcel Proust -
It is a mistake to speak of a bad choice in love, since, as soon as a choice exists, it can only be bad.
Marcel Proust -
But sometimes the future is latent in us without our knowing it, and our supposedly lying words foreshadow an imminent reality.
Marcel Proust
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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.
Marcel Proust -
There is probably no one, however rigid his virtue, who is not liable to find himself, by the complexity of circumstances, living at close quarters with the very vice which he himself has been most outspoken in condemning -- without altogether recognizing it beneath the disguise of ambiguous behavior which it assumes in his presence.
Marcel Proust -
Conversation, which is friendship's mode of expression, is a superficial digression which gives us nothing worth acquiring. We may talk for a lifetime without doing more than indefinitely repeat the vacuity of a minute.
Marcel Proust -
The creation of the world did not occur at the beginning of time, it occurs every day.
Marcel Proust -
The most familiar precepts are not always the truest.
Marcel Proust -
Love is space and time measured by the heart.
Marcel Proust
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A woman whom we need and who makes us suffer elicits from us a whole gamut of feelings far more profound and vital than a man of genius who interests us.
Marcel Proust -
...a writer's works, like the water in an artesian well, mount to a height which is in proportion to the depth to which suffering has penetrated his soul.
Marcel Proust -
Our memory is like a shop in the window of which is exposed now one, now another photograph of the same person. And as a rule the most recent exhibit remains for some time the only one to be seen.
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.
Marcel Proust -
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.
Marcel Proust -
No days, perhaps, of all our childhood are ever so fully lived as those that we had regarded as not being lived at all: days spent wholly with a favourite book. Everything that seemed to fill them full for others we pushed aside, because it stood between us and the pleasures of the Gods.
Marcel Proust
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Are not the thoughts of the dying often turned towards the practical, painful, obscure, visceral aspect, towards the "seamy side" of death which is, as it happens, the side that death actually presents to them and forces them to feel, and which far more closely resembles a crushing burden, a difficulty in breathing, a destroying thirst, than the abstract idea to which we are accustomed to give the name of Death?
Marcel Proust -
To write that essential book, a great writer does not need to invent it but merely to translate it, since it already exists in each one of us. The duty and task of a writer are those of translator.
Marcel Proust -
A work in which there are theories is like an object which still has the ticket that shows its price.
Marcel Proust -
When I was small child, all that belonged to conservative society was fashionable, and no republicans were welcome in the smartersalons. People living in such a milieu could imagine that the impossibility of ever inviting an "opportunist", much less a "radical", was a thing that would last forever, like gas lamps and horse-drawn omnibuses. But similar to kaleidoscopes turning from time to time, society successively places in various ways elements which were thought to be immutable and creates a new composition.
Marcel Proust