Marcel Proust Quotes
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Reading is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.
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Conversation, which is friendship's mode of expression, is a superficial digression which gives us nothing worth acquiring. We may talk for a lifetime without doing more than indefinitely repeat the vacuity of a minute.
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For one cannot change, that is to say become another person, while continuing to acquiesce to the feelings of the person one no longer is.
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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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I had come in time to learn that it was a mistake to smile a friendly smile when somebody made a fool of me.
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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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Sometimes in this life, under the stress of an exceptional emotion, people do say what they think.
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Nine tenths of the ills from which intelligent people suffer spring from their intellect.
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The creation of the world did not occur at the beginning of time, it occurs every day.
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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.
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A picture's beauty does not depend on the things portrayed in it.
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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.
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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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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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The idea of dying is worse than dying itself, but less cruel than the idea that another has died.
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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.
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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.
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The most familiar precepts are not always the truest.
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Knowing does not always allow us to prevent, but at least the things that we know, we hold them, if not in our hands, but at leastin our thoughts where we may dispose of them at our whim, which gives us the illusion of power over them.
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Only by art can we get outside ourselves, instead of seeing only one world, our own, we see it under multiple forms.
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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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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.
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The great quality of true art is that it rediscovers, grasps and reveals to us that reality far from where we live, from which we get farther and farther away as the conventional knowledge we substitute for it becomes thicker and more impermeable.
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All the mind's activity is easy if it is not subjected to reality.