Marcel Proust Quotes
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In reality, every reader is, while reading, the reader of his own self.
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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 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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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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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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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.
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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.
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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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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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They like my books better in England than in France; a translation would be very successful there.
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Truth is a point of view about things.
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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.
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We believe we can change things according to our wishes because that's the only happy solution we can see. We don't think of what usually happens and what is also a happy solution; things don't change, but by and by our wishes change.
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We become moral when we are unhappy.
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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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Reading is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.
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When I am not too sad to listen, music is my consolation.
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Our virtues themselves are not free and floating qualities over which we retain a permanent control and power of disposal; they come to be so closely linked in our minds with the actions in conjunction with which we have made it our duty to exercise them that if we come to engage in an activity of a different kind, it catches us off guard and without the slightest awareness that it might involve the application of those same virtues.