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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.
Marcel Proust
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For often I have wished to see a person again without realising that it was simply because that personal recalled to me a hedge of hawthorns in blossom, and I have been led to believe, and to make someone else believe, in a renewal of affection, by what was no more than an inclination to travel.
Marcel Proust
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We were resigned to suffering, thinking that we loved outside ourselves, and we perceive that our love is a function of our sorrow, that our love perhaps is our sorrow.
Marcel Proust
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In reality, every reader is, while reading, the reader of his own self.
Marcel Proust
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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.
Marcel Proust
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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.
Marcel Proust
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In summoning even the wisest of physicians to our aid, it is probably that he is relying upon a scientific "truth", the error of which will become obvious in just a few years' time.
Marcel Proust
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Those whose suffering is due to love are, as we say of certain invalids, their own physicians.
Marcel Proust
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Truth is a point of view about things.
Marcel Proust
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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.
Marcel Proust
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... in love, barriers cannot be destroyed from the outside by the one to whom the cause despair, no matter what he does; and it isonly when he is no longer concerned with them that, suddenly, as a result of work coming from elsewhere, accomplished within the one who did not love him, these barriers, formerly attacked without success, fall futilely.
Marcel Proust
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Although time changes people, it cannot change the image we have already made of them.
Marcel Proust
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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.
Marcel Proust
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For the writer as well as for the painter, style is not a question of technique, but of vision.
Marcel Proust
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We become moral when we are unhappy.
Marcel Proust
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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.
Marcel Proust
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The memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment.
Marcel Proust
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When I am not too sad to listen, music is my consolation.
Marcel Proust
