Marcel Proust Quotes
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It is often hard to bear the tears that we ourselves have caused.
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It has been said that beauty is a promise of happiness. Conversely, the possibility of pleasure can be a beginning of beauty.
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Wars are fought for the benefit of oligarchs, triumphs bought with the blood of peons.
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Not caring for their lives' is it? Why, what in the world is there that we should care for if it's not our lives, the only gift the Lord never offers us a second time.
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No days, perhaps, of all our childhood are ever so fully lived as those that we had regarded as not being lived at all: days spent wholly with a favourite book. Everything that seemed to fill them full for others we pushed aside, because it stood between us and the pleasures of the Gods.
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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!
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To understand a profound thought is to have, at the moment one understands it, a profound thought oneself; and this demands some effort, a genuine descent to the heart of oneself . . . Only desire and love give us the strength to make this effort. The only books that we truly absorb are those we read with real appetite, after having worked hard to get them, so great had been our need of them.
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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.
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For although we know that the years pass, that youth gives way to old age, that fortunes and thrones crumble (even the most solid among them) and that fame is transitory, the manner in which—by means of a sort of snapshot—we take cognisance of this moving universe whirled along by Time, has the contrary effect of immobilising it.
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Error, by force of contrast, enhances the triumph of Truth.
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Happiness serves hardly any other purpose than to make unhappiness possible.
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The reason why life may be judged to be trivial although at certain moments it seems to us so beautiful is that we form our judgment, ordinarily, not on the evidence of life itself but of those quite different images which preserve nothing of life-and therefore we judge it disparagingly.
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The true end of education is not only to make the young learned, but to make them love learning; not only to make them industrious, but to make them love industry; not only to make them virtuous, but to make them love virtue; not only to make them just, but to make them hunger and thirst after justice.
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Love is space and time measured by the heart.
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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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But when one believes in the reality of things, making them visible by artificial means is not quite the same as feeling that they are close at hand.
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Sometimes in this life, under the stress of an exceptional emotion, people do say what they think.
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... 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.
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When we have passed a certain age, the soul of the child that we were and the souls of the dead from whom we sprang come and shower upon us their riches and their spells, asking to be allowed to contribute to the new emotions which we feel and in which, erasing their former image, we recast them in an original creation.
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What we have not had to decipher, to elucidate by our own efforts, what was clear before we looked at it, is not ours. From ourselves comes only that which we drag forth from the obscurity which lies within us, that which to others is unknown.
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The tiny, initial clue ... by allowing us to imagine what we do not know, stimulates a desire for knowledge.
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Nine tenths of the ills from which intelligent people suffer spring from their intellect.
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The duty and the task of a writer are those of an interpreter.
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Our words are, as a general rule, filled by the people to whom we address them with a meaning which those people derive from their own substance, a meaning widely different from that which we had put into the same words when we uttered them.