Marcel Proust Quotes
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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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For women who do not love us, as for the "disappeared", knowing that we no longer have any hope does not prevent us form continuing to wait. We live on our guard, on watch; women whose son has gone asea on a dangerous exploration imagine at any minute, although it has long been certain that he has perished, that he will enter, miraculously saved, and healthy.
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What barrier is so insurmountable as silence?
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Error, by force of contrast, enhances the triumph of Truth.
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How can we have the courage to wish to live, how can we make a movement to preserve ourselves from death, in a world where love is provoked by a lie and consists solely in the need of having our sufferings appeased by whatever being has made us suffer?
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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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A change in the weather is sufficient to recreate the world and ourselves.
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Our shadows, now parallel, now close together and joined, traced an exquisite pattern at our feet.
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The tiny, initial clue ... by allowing us to imagine what we do not know, stimulates a desire for knowledge.
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It is a mistake to speak of a bad choice in love, since, as soon as a choice exists, it can only be bad.
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The particulars of life do not matter to the artist; they merely provide him with the opportunity to lay bare his genius.
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Habit! that skillful but slow arranger, which starts out by letting our spirit suffer for weeks in a temporary state, but that thespirit is after all happy to discover, for without habit and reduced to its own resources, the spirit would be unable to make any lodgings seem habitable.
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The most powerful soporific is sleep itself.
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The only paradise is paradise lost.
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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.
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We strive all the time to give our life its form, but we do so by copying willy-nilly, like a drawing, the features of the person that we are and not of the person we should like to be.
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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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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.
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Our words are, as a general rule, filled by the people to whom we address them with a meaning which those people derive from their own substance, a meaning widely different from that which we had put into the same words when we uttered them.
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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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The time at our disposal each day is elastic; the passions we feel dilate it, those that inspire us shrink it, and habit fills it.
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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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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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The fixity of a habit is generally in direct proportion to its absurdity.