Marcel Proust Quotes
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Kind hearts are the garden, kind thoughts are the roots, kind words are the blossoms, kind deeds are the fruit.
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It is often hard to bear the tears that we ourselves have caused.
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How else learn the real, if not by inventing what might lie outside it?
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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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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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There are people whose faces assume an unaccustomed beauty and majesty the moment they cease to look out of their eyes.
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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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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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In his younger days a man dreams of possessing the heart of the woman whom he loves; later, the feeling that he possesses the heart of a woman may be enough to make him fall in love with her.
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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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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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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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Often it is just lack of imagination that keeps a man from suffering very much.
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A work in which there are theories is like an object which still has the ticket that shows its price.
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Reality is never more than a first step towards an unknown on the road to which one can never progress very far.
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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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Let us be grateful to people who make us happy, they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.
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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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She was a woman of uncertain age.
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Even the simple act that we call "going to visit a person of our acquaintance" is in part an intellectual act. We fill the physical appearance of the person we see with all the notions we have about him, and in the totality of our impressions about him, these notions play the most important role.
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Nature is painting for us, day after day, pictures of infinite beauty.
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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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Time passes, and little by little everything that we have spoken in falsehood becomes true.
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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.