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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Truth is a point of view about things.
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Those whose suffering is due to love are, as we say of certain invalids, their own physicians.
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Although time changes people, it cannot change the image we have already made of them.
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In reality, every reader is, while reading, the reader of his own self.
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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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... 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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We become moral when we are unhappy.
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The memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment.