Marcel Proust Quotes
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The images selected by memory are as arbitrary, as narrow, as elusive as those which the imagination had formed and reality has destroyed. There is no reason why, existing outside ourselves, a real place should conform to the pictures in our memory rather than those in our dreams.
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Love is space and time measured by the heart.
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When one becomes for an instant one's former self, that is to say different from what one has been for some time past, one's sensibility, being no longer dulled by habit, receives from the slightest stimulus vivid impressions which make everything that has preceded them fade into insignificance, impressions to which, because of their intensity, we attach ourselves with the momentary enthusiasm of a drunkard.
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A sleeping man holds in a circle around him the thread of the hours, the order of years and of worlds. He consults them instinctively upon awaking and in one second reads in them the point of the earth that he occupies, the time past until his arousal; but their ranks can be mingled or broken.
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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.
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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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It seems that certain transcendental realities emit rays to which the masses are sensitive. That is how, for example, when an event takes place, when at the front an army is in danger, or defeated, or victorious, the rather obscure news which the cultivated man does not quite understand, excite in the masses an emotion which surprises him and in which, once the experts have informed him of the actual military situation, he recognizes the populace's perception of that "aura" surrounding great events and visible for hundreds of kilometers.
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The bonds that unite us to another human being are sanctified when he or she adopts the same point of view as ourselves in judging one of our imperfections.
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To the pure all things are pure!
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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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She was a woman of uncertain age.
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When you work to please others you can't succeed, but the things you do to satisfy yourself stand a chance of catching someone's interest.
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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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We think and name in one world, we live and feel in another.
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Often it is just lack of imagination that keeps a man from suffering very much.
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For, just as in the beginning it is formed by desire, so afterwards love is kept in existence only by painful anxiety.
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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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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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Time passes, and little by little everything that we have spoken in falsehood becomes true.
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Everybody calls "clear" those ideas which have the same degree of confusion as his own.
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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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The fixity of a habit is generally in direct proportion to its absurdity.
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It is only with the passions of others that we are ever really familiar, and what we come to discover about our own can only be learned from them.
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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.