Marcel Proust Quotes
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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.
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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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Often it is just lack of imagination that keeps a man from suffering very much.
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But sometimes the future is latent in us without our knowing it, and our supposedly lying words foreshadow an imminent reality.
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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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Kind hearts are the garden, kind thoughts are the roots, kind words are the blossoms, kind deeds are the fruit.
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We construct our lives for one person, and when at length it is ready to receive her that person does not come; presently she is dead to us, and we live on, prisoners within the walls which were intended only for her.
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Lies are essential to humanity. They are perhaps as important as the pursuit of pleasure and moreover are dictated by that pursuit.
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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.
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There is no man ... however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived a life, the memory of which is so unpleasant to him that he would gladly expunge it. And yet he ought not entirely to regret it, because he cannot be certain that he has indeed become a wise man -- so far as it is possible for any of us to be wise -- unless he has passed through all the fatuous or unwholesome incarnations by which that ultimate stage must be preceded.
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Three-quarters of the sicknesses of intelligent people come from their intelligence. They need at least a doctor who can understand this sickness.
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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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The great renunciation of old age as it prepared for death, wraps itself up in its chrysalis, which may be observed at the end of lives that are at all prolonged, even in old lovers who have lived for one another, in old friends bound by the closest ties of mutual sympathy, who, after a certain year, cease to make the necessary journey or even to cross the street to see one another, cease to correspond, and know that they will communicate no more in this world.
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Everybody calls "clear" those ideas which have the same degree of confusion as his own.
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She was a woman of uncertain age.
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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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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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We do not succeed in changing things according to our desire, but gradually our desire changes. The situation that we hoped to change because it was intolerable becomes unimportant. We have not managed to surmount the obstacle, as we were absolutely determined to do, but life has taken us round it, led us past it, and then if we turn round to gaze at the remote past, we can barely catch sight of it, so imperceptible has it become.
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But,instead of what our imagination makes us suppose and which we worthless try to discover, life gives us something that we could hardly imagine.
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... But all the feelings that evoke in us the joy or the misfortune of a real person are only produced in us through the intermediary of an image of that joy or that misfortune; the ingeniousness of the first novelist was in understanding that, in the apparatus of our emotions, since the image is the only essential element, the simplification which consists of purely and simply suppressing the factual characters is a definitive improvement.
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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.
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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.
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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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In the sort of screen dappled with different states of mind which my consciousness would simultaneously unfold while I read, and which ranged from the aspirations hidden deepest within me to the completely exterior vision of the horizon which I had, at the bottom of the garden, before my eyes, what was first in me, innermost, the constantly moving handle that controlled the rest, was my belief in the philosophical richness and beauty of the book I was reading, and my desire to appropriate them for myself, whatever that book might be.