Marcel Proust Quotes
-
... 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.
-
The great quality of true art is that it rediscovers, grasps and reveals to us that reality far from where we live, from which we get farther and farther away as the conventional knowledge we substitute for it becomes thicker and more impermeable.
-
For, just as in the beginning it is formed by desire, so afterwards love is kept in existence only by painful anxiety.
-
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.
-
The creation of the world did not occur at the beginning of time, it occurs every day.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Reality is never more than a first step towards an unknown on the road to which one can never progress very far.
-
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.
-
What barrier is so insurmountable as silence?
-
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.
-
There is no idea that does not carry in itself a possible refutation, no word that does not imply its opposite.
-
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.
-
But sometimes the future is latent in us without our knowing it, and our supposedly lying words foreshadow an imminent reality.
-
The fixity of a habit is generally in direct proportion to its absurdity.
-
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.
-
The idea of dying is worse than dying itself, but less cruel than the idea that another has died.
-
Love is space and time measured by the heart.
-
The most powerful soporific is sleep itself.
-
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.
-
A little insomnia is not without its value in making us appreciate sleep, in throwing a ray of light upon that darkness.
-
All the mind's activity is easy if it is not subjected to reality.
-
The tiny, initial clue ... by allowing us to imagine what we do not know, stimulates a desire for knowledge.