Marcel Proust Quotes
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Love is space and time measured by the heart.
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The only paradise is paradise lost.
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What barrier is so insurmountable as silence?
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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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The tiny, initial clue ... by allowing us to imagine what we do not know, stimulates a desire for knowledge.
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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.
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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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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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The most powerful soporific is sleep itself.
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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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Our shadows, now parallel, now close together and joined, traced an exquisite pattern at our feet.
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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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The fixity of a habit is generally in direct proportion to its absurdity.
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I do my intellectual work inside myself, and once I am with my fellow creatures it is more or less a matter of indifference to me whether or not they are intelligent as long as they are kind, sincere, etc.
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Theoretically, we know that the world turns, but in fact we do not notice it, the earth on which we walk does not seem to move andwe live on in peace. This is how it is concerning Time in our lives. And to render its passing perceptible, novelists must... have their readers cross ten, twenty, thirty years in two minutes.
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The true end of education is not only to make the young learned, but to make them love learning; not only to make them industrious, but to make them love industry; not only to make them virtuous, but to make them love virtue; not only to make them just, but to make them hunger and thirst after justice.
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Desire makes everything blossom; possession makes everything wither and fade.
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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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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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All the mind's activity is easy if it is not subjected to reality.
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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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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 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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To achieve accurate knowledge of others, if such a thing were possible, we could only ever arrive at it through the slow and unsure recognition of our own initial optical inaccuracies. However, such knowledge is not possible: for, while our vision of others is being adjusted, they, who are not made of mere brute matter, are also changing; we think we have managed to see them more clearly, but they shift; and when we believe we have them fully in focus, it is merely our older images of them that we have clarified, but which are themselves already out of date.