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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... 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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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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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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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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They like my books better in England than in France; a translation would be very successful there.
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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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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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For the writer as well as for the painter, style is not a question of technique, but of vision.
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Reading is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.
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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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The memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment.
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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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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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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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When I am not too sad to listen, music is my consolation.
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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.