Marcel Proust Quotes
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Although time changes people, it cannot change the image we have already made of them.
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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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Wisdom cannot be imparted. Wisdom that a wise man attempts to impart always sounds like foolishness to someone else ... Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, live it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it.” - Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha "We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us from.
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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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We say that we often see animals in our dreams, but we forget that almost always we are ourselves animals therein, deprived of that reasoning power which projects upon things the light of certainty; on the contrary we bring to bear on the spectacle of life only a dubious vision, extinguished anew every moment by oblivion, the former reality fading before that which follows it as one projection of a magic lantern fades before the next as we change the slide.
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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?
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It is up to my spirit to find the truth. But how? Grave uncertainty, each time the spirit feels beyond its own comprehension; whenit, the explorer, is altogether to obscure land that it must search and where all its baggage is of no use. To search? That is not all: to create.
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Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.
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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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The memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment.
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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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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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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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The artist who gives up an hour of work for an hour of conversation with a friend knows that he is sacrificing a reality for something that does not exist (our friends being friends only in the light of an agreeable folly which travels with us through life and to which we readily accommodate ourselves, but which at the bottom of our hearts we know to be no more reasonable than the delusion of the man who talks to the furniture because he believes that it is alive.).
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We are at times too ready to believe that the present is the only possible state of things.
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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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There is no more ridiculous custom than the one that makes you express sympathy once and for all on a given day to a person whose sorrow will endure as long as his life. Such grief, felt in such a way is always present, it is never too late to talk about it, never repetitious to mention it again.
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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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Truth is a point of view about things.
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I drank a second mouthful in which I find nothing more than in the first, then a third which gives me rather less than the second. It is time to stop; the potion is losing its magic.
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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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Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.
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In reality, every reader is, while reading, the reader of his own self.
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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.