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Just as those who practice the same profession recognize each other instinctively, so do those who practice the same vice.
Marcel Proust -
The fixity of a habit is generally in direct proportion to its absurdity.
Marcel Proust
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And so when studying faces, we do indeed measure them, but as painters, not as surveyors.
Marcel Proust -
Thanks to art, instead of seeing one world, our own, we see it multiplied and as many original artists as there are, so many worlds are at our disposal.
Marcel Proust -
It's odd how a person always arouses admiration for his moral qualities among the relatives of another with whom he has sexual relations. Physical love, so unjustifiably decried, makes everyone show, down to the least detail, all he has of goodness and self-sacrifice, so that he shines even in the eyes of those nearest to him.
Marcel Proust -
Nature is painting for us, day after day, pictures of infinite beauty.
Marcel Proust -
A picture's beauty does not depend on the things portrayed in it.
Marcel Proust -
The particulars of life do not matter to the artist; they merely provide him with the opportunity to lay bare his genius.
Marcel Proust
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The reason why life may be judged to be trivial although at certain moments it seems to us so beautiful is that we form our judgment, ordinarily, not on the evidence of life itself but of those quite different images which preserve nothing of life-and therefore we judge it disparagingly.
Marcel Proust -
We say that we often see animals in our dreams, but we forget that almost always we are ourselves animals therein, deprived of that reasoning power which projects upon things the light of certainty; on the contrary we bring to bear on the spectacle of life only a dubious vision, extinguished anew every moment by oblivion, the former reality fading before that which follows it as one projection of a magic lantern fades before the next as we change the slide.
Marcel Proust -
This labour of the artist to discover a means of apprehending beneath matter and experience, beneath words, something different from their appearance, is of an exactly contrary nature to the operation in which pride, passion, intelligence and habit are constantly engaged within us when we spend our lives without self-communion, accumulating as though to hide our true impressions, the terminology for practical ends which we falsely call life.
Marcel Proust -
Although time changes people, it cannot change the image we have already made of them.
Marcel Proust -
A collection of bad love songs, tattered from overuse, has to touch us like a cemetery or a village. So what if the houses have no style, if the graves are vanishing under tasteless ornaments and inscriptions? Before an imagination sympathetic and respectful enough to conceal momentarily its aesthetic disdain, that dust may release a flock of souls, their beaks holding the still verdant dreams that gave them an inkling of the next world and let them rejoice or weep in this world.
Marcel Proust -
For every sin there is forgiveness, and especially for the sins of youth.
Marcel Proust
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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.
Marcel Proust -
As to the pretty girls who went past, from the day on which I had first known that their cheeks could be kissed, I had become curious about their souls. And the Universe had appeared to me more interesting.
Marcel Proust -
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.
Marcel Proust -
Neurosis has an absolute genius for malingering. There is no illness which it cannot counterfeit perfectly. If it is capable of deceiving the doctor, how should it fail to deceive the patient.
Marcel Proust -
An hour or so later he received a note from Odette. Swann had left his cigarette case at her house. "If only," she wrote, "you had also forgotten your heart! I should never have let you have it back.
Marcel Proust -
We must never be afraid to go too far, for truth lies beyond.
Marcel Proust
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A change in the weather is sufficient to recreate the world and ourselves.
Marcel Proust -
According to a charming law of nature which is evident even in the most sophisticated societies, we live in complete ignorance of whatever we love.
Marcel Proust -
We scornfully decline, because of one whom we love and who will some day be of so little account, to see another who is of no account to-day, with whom we shall be in love to-morrow, with whom we might, perhaps, had we consented to see her now, have fallen in love a little earlier and who would thus have put a term to our present sufferings, bringing others, it is true, in their place.
Marcel Proust -
Wisdom cannot be imparted. Wisdom that a wise man attempts to impart always sounds like foolishness to someone else ... Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, live it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it.” - Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha "We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us from.
Marcel Proust