Marcel Proust Quotes
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If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time.
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Our desires cut across one another, and in this confused existence it is rare for happiness to coincide with the desire that clamoured for it.
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In a language known to us, we have substituted the opacity of the sounds with the transparence of the ideas. But a language we donot know is a closed place in which the one we love can deceive us, making us, locked outside and convulsed in our impotence, incapable of seeing or preventing anything.
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The loss of a sense adds as much beauty to the world as its acquisition.
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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.
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The reason why a work of genius is not easily admired from the first is that the man who has created it is extraordinary, that few other men resemble him. It is his work itself that, by fertilising the rare minds capable of understanding it, will make them increase and multiply.
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In theory one is aware that the earth revolves, but in practice one does not perceive it, the ground upon which one treads seems not to move, and one can live undisturbed. So it is with Time in one's life.
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Time, which changes people, does not alter the image we have retained of them.
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We shall see later on that the diversity of the forms of death that circulate invisibly is the cause of the peculiar unexpectedness of obituary notices in the newspapers.
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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.
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Women who are to some extent resistant, whom one cannot possess at once, whom one does not even know at first whether one will ever possess, are the only interesting ones.
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She's got feet like boats, whiskers like an American, and her undies are filthy.
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A woman whom we need and who makes us suffer elicits from us a whole gamut of feelings far more profound and vital than a man of genius who interests us.
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That which we remember of our conduct is ignored by our closest neighbour; but that which we have forgotten having said, or even what we never said, will cause laughter even into the next world.
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Beautiful books are always written in a sort of foreign language.
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The only thing that does not change is that at any and every time it appears that there have been great changes.
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We say that we often see animals in our dreams, but we forget that almost always we are ourselves animals therein, deprived of that reasoning power which projects upon things the light of certainty; on the contrary we bring to bear on the spectacle of life only a dubious vision, extinguished anew every moment by oblivion, the former reality fading before that which follows it as one projection of a magic lantern fades before the next as we change the slide.
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Through art alone are we able to emerge from ourselves, to know what another person sees of a universe which is not the same as our own and of which, without art, the landscapes would remain as unknown to us as those that may exist on the moon.
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Pleasures are like photographs: in the presence of the person we love, we take only negatives, which we develop later, at home, when we have at our disposal once more our inner dark room, the door of which it is strictly forbidden to open while others are present.
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In reality, in love there is a permanent suffering which joy neutralizes, renders virtual delays, but which can at any moment become what it would have become long earlier if one had not obtained what one wanted – atrocious.
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Our passions shape our books, repose writes them in the intervals.
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A woman one loves rarely suffices for all our needs, so we deceive her with another whom we do not love.
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As soon as he ceased to be mad he became merely stupid. There are maladies we must not seek to cure because they alone protect us from others that are more serious.
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We ought at least, from prudence, never to speak of ourselves, because that is a subject on which we may be sure that other people's views are never in accordance with our own.