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You can't learn the truth about a man's intentions by asking him.
Marcel Proust -
What barrier is so insurmountable as silence?
Marcel Proust
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The great quality of true art is that it rediscovers, grasps and reveals to us that reality far from where we live, from which we get farther and farther away as the conventional knowledge we substitute for it becomes thicker and more impermeable.
Marcel Proust -
Beautiful books are always written in a sort of foreign language.
Marcel Proust -
One becomes moral as soon as one is unhappy.
Marcel Proust -
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.
Marcel Proust -
We think and name in one world, we live and feel in another.
Marcel Proust -
There is no man ... however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived a life, the memory of which is so unpleasant to him that he would gladly expunge it. And yet he ought not entirely to regret it, because he cannot be certain that he has indeed become a wise man -- so far as it is possible for any of us to be wise -- unless he has passed through all the fatuous or unwholesome incarnations by which that ultimate stage must be preceded.
Marcel Proust
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Error, by force of contrast, enhances the triumph of Truth.
Marcel Proust -
May you always see a blue sky overhead, my young friend; and then, even when the time comes, as it has come for me now, when the woods are black, when night is fast falling, you will be able to console yourself, as I do, by looking up at the sky.
Marcel Proust -
I should have been happy: I wasn’t.
Marcel Proust -
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.
Marcel Proust -
Nine tenths of the ills from which intelligent people suffer spring from their intellect.
Marcel Proust -
We strive all the time to give our life its form, but we do so by copying willy-nilly, like a drawing, the features of the person that we are and not of the person we should like to be.
Marcel Proust
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Let us leave pretty women to men devoid of imagination.
Marcel Proust -
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.
Marcel Proust -
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.
Marcel Proust -
She was a woman of uncertain age.
Marcel Proust -
For, just as in the beginning it is formed by desire, so afterwards love is kept in existence only by painful anxiety.
Marcel Proust -
For each illness that doctors cure with medicine, they provoke ten in healthy people by inoculating them with the virus that is a thousand times more powerful than any microbe: the idea that one is ill.
Marcel Proust
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There is no man, however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived in a way the consciousness of which is so unpleasant to him in later life that he would gladly, if he could, expunge it from his memory.
Marcel Proust -
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.
Marcel Proust -
If only for the sake of elegance, I try to remain morally pure.
Marcel Proust -
Wars are fought for the benefit of oligarchs, triumphs bought with the blood of peons.
Marcel Proust