Marcel Proust Quotes
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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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And so when studying faces, we do indeed measure them, but as painters, not as surveyors.
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A work in which there are theories is like an object which still has the ticket that shows its price.
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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.
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For each illness that doctors cure with medicine, they provoke ten in healthy people by inoculating them with the virus that is a thousand times more powerful than any microbe: the idea that one is ill.
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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.
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Which of course is followed by: For those who have Awareness, a hint is quite enough. For the multitudes of heedless mere knowledge is useless. Haji Bektash Veli We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.
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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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We live not alone but chained to a creature of a different kingdom: our body.
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Even the simple act that we call "going to visit a person of our acquaintance" is in part an intellectual act. We fill the physical appearance of the person we see with all the notions we have about him, and in the totality of our impressions about him, these notions play the most important role.
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A change in the weather is sufficient to recreate the world and ourselves.
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Although time changes people, it cannot change the image we have already made of them.
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There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book.
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Each reader reads only what is already within himself. The book is only a sort of optical instrument which the writer offers to the reader to enable the latter to discover in himself what he would not have found but for the aid of the book.
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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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Love is not vain because it is frustrated, but because it is fulfilled. The people we love turn to ashes when we posess them.
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The idea of dying is worse than dying itself, but less cruel than the idea that another has died.
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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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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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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.
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We have nothing to fear and a great deal to learn from trees, that vigorours and pacific tribe which without stint produces strengthening essences for us, soothing balms, and in whose gracious company we spend so many cool, silent, and intimate hours.
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What we have not had to decipher, to elucidate by our own efforts, what was clear before we looked at it, is not ours. From ourselves comes only that which we drag forth from the obscurity which lies within us, that which to others is unknown.
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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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Time passes, and little by little everything that we have spoken in falsehood becomes true.