Marcel Proust Quotes
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Even from the simplest, the most realistic point of view, the countries which we long for occupy, at any given moment, a far larger place in our actual life than the country in which we happen to be.
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We must never be afraid to go too far, for truth lies beyond.
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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.
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They like my books better in England than in France; a translation would be very successful there.
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Existence is of little interest save on days when the dust of realities is mingled with magic sand.
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The truth is that men can have several sorts of pleasure. The true pleasure is the one for which they abandon the other.
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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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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.
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As long as men are free to ask what they must, free to say what they think, free to think what they will, freedom can never be lost and science can never regress.
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Reading is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.
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A picture's beauty does not depend on the things portrayed in it.
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Habit! that skilful but slow-moving arranger who begins by letting our minds suffer for weeks on end in temporary quarters, but whom our minds are none the less only too happy to discover at last, for without it, reduced to their own devices, they would be powerless to make any room seem habitable.
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Truth is a point of view about things.
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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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Illness is the most heeded of doctors: to goodness and wisdom we only make promises; pain we obey.
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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.
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Nobility is often no more than the inner aspect which our egotistical feelings assume when we have not yet named and classified them.
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The only paradise is paradise lost.
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Friendship is in the end no more than: " . . . a lie which seeks to make us believe that we are not irremediably alone."
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To be an artist is to fail, as no other dare to fail... failure is his world and the shrink from it desertion.
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A man of letters, merely by reading a phrase, can estimate exactly the literary merit of its author.
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The stellar universe is not so difficult to understand as the real actions of other people, especially of the people with whom we are in love.
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To achieve accurate knowledge of others, if such a thing were possible, we could only ever arrive at it through the slow and unsure recognition of our own initial optical inaccuracies. However, such knowledge is not possible: for, while our vision of others is being adjusted, they, who are not made of mere brute matter, are also changing; we think we have managed to see them more clearly, but they shift; and when we believe we have them fully in focus, it is merely our older images of them that we have clarified, but which are themselves already out of date.
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Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.