Marcel Proust Quotes
-
The particulars of life do not matter to the artist; they merely provide him with the opportunity to lay bare his genius.
-
What barrier is so insurmountable as silence?
-
One becomes moral as soon as one is unhappy.
-
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.
-
I had come in time to learn that it was a mistake to smile a friendly smile when somebody made a fool of me.
-
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.
-
It is a mistake to speak of a bad choice in love, since, as soon as a choice exists, it can only be bad.
-
Do you suppose that it is within your power to insult me? You evidently are not aware to whom you are speaking? Do you imagine that the envenomed spittle of five hundred little gentlemen of your type, heaped one upon another, would succeed in slobbering so much as the tips of my august toes?
-
The creation of the world did not occur at the beginning of time, it occurs every day.
-
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.
-
The opinions which we hold of one another, our relations with friends and kinsfolk are in no sense permanent, save in appearance, but are as eternally fluid as the sea itself.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Only by art can we get outside ourselves, instead of seeing only one world, our own, we see it under multiple forms.
-
All the mind's activity is easy if it is not subjected to reality.
-
The most familiar precepts are not always the truest.
-
It is not only by dint of lying to others, but also of lying to ourselves, that we cease to notice that we are lying.
-
The idea of dying is worse than dying itself, but less cruel than the idea that another has died.
-
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.
-
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?
-
Reading is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.
-
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.
-
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.