Marcel Proust Quotes
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Like everybody who is not in love, he thought one chose the person to be loved after endless deliberations and on the basis of particular qualities or advantages.
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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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We think and name in one world, we live and feel in another.
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We have such numerous interests in our lives that it is not uncommon, on a single occasion, for the foundations of a happiness that does not yet exist to be laid down alongside the intensification of a grief from which we are still suffering.
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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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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.
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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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The fixity of a habit is generally in direct proportion to its absurdity.
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Nine tenths of the ills from which intelligent people suffer spring from their intellect.
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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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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.
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Wars are fought for the benefit of oligarchs, triumphs bought with the blood of peons.
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There is no idea that does not carry in itself a possible refutation, no word that does not imply its opposite.
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One becomes moral as soon as one is unhappy.
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We are ordinarily so indifferent to people that when we have invested one of them with the possibility of giving us joy, or suffering, it seems as if he must belong to some other universe, he is imbued with poetry.
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Just as those who practice the same profession recognize each other instinctively, so do those who practice the same vice.
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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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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.
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I cannot express the uneasiness caused in me by this intrusion of mystery and beauty into a room I had at last filled with myself to the point of paying no more attention to the room than to that self. The anesthetizing influence of habit having ceased, I would begin to have thoughts, and feelings, and they are such sad things.
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What barrier is so insurmountable as silence?
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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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Our vanity, our passions, our spirit of imitation, our abstract intelligence, our habits have long been at work, and it is the task of art to undo this work of theirs, making us travel back in the direction from which we have come to the depths where what has really existed lies unknown within us.
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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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Lies are essential to humanity.