Marcel Proust Quotes
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We think and name in one world, we live and feel in another.
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Beautiful books are always written in a sort of foreign language.
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How else learn the real, if not by inventing what might lie outside it?
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It is not because other people are dead that our affection for them grows faint, it is because we ourselves are dying.
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Often it is just lack of imagination that keeps a man from suffering very much.
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So we don't believe that life is beautiful because we don't recall it but if we get a whiff of a long-forgotten smell we are suddenly intoxicated and similarly we think we no longer love the dead because we don't remember them but if by chance we come across an old glove we burst into tears.
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Our passions shape our books, repose writes them in the intervals.
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After a certain age our memories are so intertwined with one another that what we are thinking of, the book we are reading, scarcely matters any more. We have put something of ourselves everywhere, everything is fertile, everything is dangerous, and we can make discoveries no less precious than in Pascal's Pensées in an advertisement for soap.
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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.
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Love...., ever unsatisfied, lives always in the moment that is about to come.
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Like many intellectuals, he was incapable of saying a simple thing in a simple way.
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Our shadows, now parallel, now close together and joined, traced an exquisite pattern at our feet.
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The paradoxes of today are the prejudices of tomorrow, since the most benighted and the most deplorable prejudices have had their moment of novelty when fashion lent them its fragile grace.
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Let us be grateful to people who make us happy, they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.
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To the pure all things are pure!
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You can't learn the truth about a man's intentions by asking him.
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When the mind has a tendency to dream, it is a mistake to keep dreams away from it, to ration its dreams. So long as you distract your mind from its dreams, it will not know them for what they are; you will always be being taken in by the appearance of things, because you will not have grasped their true nature. If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time. One must have a thorough understanding of one.
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Photography is the product of complete alienation.
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Like everybody who is not in love, he thought one chose the person to be loved after endless deliberations and on the basis of particular qualities or advantages.
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Do not wait for life. Do not long for it. Be aware, always and at every moment, that the miracle is in the here and now.
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Time, which changes people, does not alter the image we have retained of them.
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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.
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There comes in all our lives a time ... when the ears can listen to no music save what the moonlight breathes through the flute of silence.
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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.