Marcel Proust Quotes
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In reality, every reader is, while reading, the reader of his own self.
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Truth is a point of view about things.
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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.
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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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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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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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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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For the writer as well as for the painter, style is not a question of technique, but of vision.
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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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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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Reading is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.
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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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A man of letters, merely by reading a phrase, can estimate exactly the literary merit of its author.
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When I am not too sad to listen, music is my consolation.
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We become moral when we are unhappy.
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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.
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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.