Marcel Proust Quotes
-
A change in the weather is sufficient to recreate the world and ourselves.
-
Not caring for their lives' is it? Why, what in the world is there that we should care for if it's not our lives, the only gift the Lord never offers us a second time.
-
And so when studying faces, we do indeed measure them, but as painters, not as surveyors.
-
Time passes, and little by little everything that we have spoken in falsehood becomes true.
-
Just as those who practice the same profession recognize each other instinctively, so do those who practice the same vice.
-
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.
-
I had long since given up trying to extract from a woman as it were the square root of her unknown quantity, the mystery of which a mere introduction was generally enough to dispel.
-
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.
-
People wish to learn to swim and at the same time to keep one foot on the ground.
-
In his younger days a man dreams of possessing the heart of the woman whom he loves; later, the feeling that he possesses the heart of a woman may be enough to make him fall in love with her.
-
The most familiar precepts are not always the truest.
-
...that melancholy which we feel when we cease to obey orders which, from one day to another, keep the future hidden, and realise that we have at last begun to live in real earnest, as a grown-up person, the life, the only life that any of us has at his disposal.
-
A picture's beauty does not depend on the things portrayed in it.
-
Nature is painting for us, day after day, pictures of infinite beauty.
-
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.
-
Lies are essential to humanity.
-
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.
-
You know Balbec so well - do you have friends in the area?' I have friends wherever there are companies of trees, wounded but not vanquished, which huddle together with touching obstinacy to implore an inclement and pitiless sky.' That is not what I meant,' interrupted my father, as obstinate as the trees and as pitiless as the sky.
-
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.
-
Those whose suffering is due to love are, as we say of certain invalids, their own physicians.
-
The heart changes...but we learn of it only from reading or by imagination; for in reality its alteration, like that of certain natural phenomena, is so gradual that, even if we are able to distinguish, successively, each of its different states, we are still spared the actual sensation of change.
-
We see things but we don't see them, like things that slid through the mind, one flowing into another.
-
Three-quarters of the sicknesses of intelligent people come from their intelligence. They need at least a doctor who can understand this sickness.
-
I had come in time to learn that it was a mistake to smile a friendly smile when somebody made a fool of me.