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It is often hard to bear the tears that we ourselves have caused.
Marcel Proust -
Love...., ever unsatisfied, lives always in the moment that is about to come.
Marcel Proust
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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.
Marcel Proust -
With one image he would make that beauty explode into me.
Marcel Proust -
We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world. The lives that you admire, the attitudes that seem noble to you, have not been shaped by a paterfamilias or a schoolmaster, they have sprung from very different beginnings, having been influenced by evil or commonplace that prevailed round them. They represent a struggle and a victory.
Marcel Proust -
The most powerful soporific is sleep itself.
Marcel Proust -
There is in this world in which everything wears out, everything perishes, one thing that crumbles into dust, that destroys itself still more completely, leaving behind still fewer traces of itself than Beauty: namely Grief.
Marcel Proust -
Man is the creature that cannot emerge from himself, that knows his fellows only in himself; when he asserts the contrary, he is lying.
Marcel Proust
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The inertia of the mind urges it to slide down the easy slope of imagination, rather than to climb the steep slope of introspection.
Marcel Proust -
None of us constitutes a material whole, identical for everyone, which a person has only to go look up as though we were a book of specifications or a last testament; our social personality is a creation of the minds of others. Even the very simple act that we call "seeing a person we know" is in part an intellectual one. We fill the physical appearance of the individual we see with all the notions we have about him, and of the total picture that we form for ourselves, these notions certainly occupy the greater part.
Marcel Proust -
Perfume is that last and best reserve of the past, the one which when all out tears have run dry, can make us cry again!
Marcel Proust -
Life is extraordinarily suave and sweet with certain natural, witty, affectionate people who have unusual distinction and are capable of every vice, but who make a display of none in public and about whom no one can affirm they have a single one. There is something supple and secret about them. Besides, their perversity gives spice to their most innocent occupations, such as taking a walk in the garden at night.
Marcel Proust -
... we made much less happy by the kindness of a great writer, which strictly speaking we find only in his books, than we suffer from the hostility of a woman whom we have not chosen for her intelligence, but whom we cannot stop ourselves from loving.
Marcel Proust -
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.
Marcel Proust
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What barrier is so insurmountable as silence?
Marcel Proust -
It is not because other people are dead that our affection for them grows faint, it is because we ourselves are dying.
Marcel Proust -
Let us be grateful to people who make us happy, they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.
Marcel Proust -
There is probably not one person, however great his virtue, who cannot be led by the complexities of life's circumstances to a familiarity with the vices he condemns the most vehemently – without his completely recognizing this vice which, disguised as certain events, touches him and wounds him: strange words, an inexplicable attitude, on a given night, of the person whom he otherwise has so many reasons to love.
Marcel Proust -
I wished to see storms only on those coasts where they raged with most violence.
Marcel Proust -
Reality is never more than a first step towards an unknown on the road to which one can never progress very far.
Marcel Proust
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You can't learn the truth about a man's intentions by asking him.
Marcel Proust -
To the pure all things are pure!
Marcel Proust -
We are ordinarily so indifferent to people that when we have invested one of them with the possibility of giving us joy, or suffering, it seems as if he must belong to some other universe, he is imbued with poetry.
Marcel Proust -
A person does not...stand motionless and clear before our eyes with his merits, his defects, his plans, his intentions with regard to ourself exposed on his surface...but is a shadow which we can never succeed in penetrating...a shadow behind which we can alternately imagine, with equal justification, that there burns the flame of hatred and of love.
Marcel Proust