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We can sometimes find a person again, but we cannot abolish time. And so on until the unforeseen day, gloomy as a winter night, when one no longer seeks that girl, or any other, when to find her would actually scare one. For one no longer feels that one has attractions enough to please, or strength enough to love. Not, of course, that one is in the strict sense of the word impotent. And as for loving, one would love more than ever. But one feels that it is too big an undertaking for the little strength one has left.
Marcel Proust -
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.
Marcel Proust
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Our intonations contain our philosophy of life, what each of us is constantly telling himself about things.
Marcel Proust -
Thanks to art, instead of seeing one world only, our own, we see that world multiply itself and we have at our disposal as many worlds as there are original artists, worlds more different one from the other than those which revolve in infinite space, worlds which, centuries after the extinction of the fire from which their light first emanated, whether it is called Rembrandt or Vermeer, send us still each one its special radiance.
Marcel Proust -
Having a body is in itself the greatest threat to the mind... The body encloses the mind in a fortress; before long the mind is besieged on all sides, and in the end the mind has to give itself up.
Marcel Proust -
A woman one loves rarely suffices for all our needs, so we deceive her with another whom we do not love.
Marcel Proust -
The highest praise of God consists in the denial of him by the atheist who finds creation so perfect that it can dispense with a creator.
Marcel Proust -
Masterpieces are no more than the shipwrecked flotsam of great minds.
Marcel Proust
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When we are in love, our love is too big a thing for us to be able altogether to contain it within ourselves. It radiates towards the loved one, finds there a surface which arrests it, forcing it to return to its starting-point, and it is this repercussion of our own feeling which we call the other's feelings and which charms us more then than on its outward journey because we do not recognise it as having originated in ourselves.
Marcel Proust -
Only through art can we get outside of ourselves and know another's view of the universe which is not the same as ours and see landscapes which otherwise would remain unknown to us like the landscapes of the moon. Thanks to art, instead of seeing a single world, our own, we see it multiply until we have before us as many worlds as there are original artists.
Marcel Proust -
We feel in one world, we think and name in another. Between the two we can set up a system of references, but we cannot fill in the gap.
Marcel Proust -
But to ask pity of our body is like discoursing in front of an octopus, for which our words can have no more meaning than the sound of the tides, and with which we should be appalled to find ourselves condemned to live.
Marcel Proust -
Habit is, of all the plants of human growth, the one that has the least need of nutritious soil in order to live, and is the first to appear on the most seemingly barren rock.
Marcel Proust -
Perhaps the immobility of the things that surround us is forced upon them by our conviction that they are themselves, and not anything else, and by the immobility of our conceptions of them.
Marcel Proust
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However, the danger in socially unbalanced relationships is that the subjection of the woman temporarily calms the man's jealousy but also renders it more demanding. He ends up making his mistress live like those prisoners on whom light is shone day and night in order for them to be better watched. And things always end in tragedy.
Marcel Proust -
Reading is at the threshold of spiritual life; it can introduce us to it; it does not constitute it. There are, however, certain cases, certain pathological cases, so to speak, of spiritual depression in which reading can become a sort of curative discipline and assume the task, through repeated stimulation, of continuously reintroducing a lazy mind into the life of the spirit.
Marcel Proust -
If there is one thing more difficult than submitting oneself to a regime it is refraining from imposing it on other people.
Marcel Proust -
A photograph acquires something of the dignity which it ordinarily lacks when it ceases to be a reproduction of reality and shows us things that no longer exist.
Marcel Proust -
A doctor who doesn't say too many foolish things is a patient half-cured.
Marcel Proust -
These dreams reminded me that, since I wished some day to become a writer, it was high time to decide what sort of books I was going to write. But as soon as I asked myself the question, and tried to discover some subject to which I could impart a philosophical significance of infinite value, my mind would stop like a clock, my consciousness would be faced with a blank, I would feel either that I was wholly devoid of talent or perhaps that some malady of the brain was hindering its development.
Marcel Proust
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People who are not in love fail to understand how an intelligent man can suffer because of a very ordinary woman. This is like being surprised that anyone should be stricken with cholera because of a creature so insignificant as the common bacillus.
Marcel Proust -
The facts of life do not penetrate to the sphere in which our beliefs are cherished; they did not engender those beliefs, and they are powerless to destroy them.
Marcel Proust -
The only thing that does not change is that at any and every time it appears that there have been great changes.
Marcel Proust -
The character we exhibit in the latter half of our life need not necessarily be, though it often is, our original character, developed further, dried up, exaggerated, or diminished. It can be its exact opposite, like a suit worn inside out.
Marcel Proust