Marcel Proust Quotes
-
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.
-
Happiness serves hardly any other purpose than to make unhappiness possible.
-
There are people whose faces assume an unaccustomed beauty and majesty the moment they cease to look out of their eyes.
-
Often it is just lack of imagination that keeps a man from suffering very much.
-
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!
-
We have such numerous interests in our lives that it is not uncommon, on a single occasion, for the foundations of a happiness that does not yet exist to be laid down alongside the intensification of a grief from which we are still suffering.
-
You can't learn the truth about a man's intentions by asking him.
-
An hour or so later he received a note from Odette. Swann had left his cigarette case at her house. "If only," she wrote, "you had also forgotten your heart! I should never have let you have it back.
-
It is often hard to bear the tears that we ourselves have caused.
-
...a writer's works, like the water in an artesian well, mount to a height which is in proportion to the depth to which suffering has penetrated his soul.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
How else learn the real, if not by inventing what might lie outside it?
-
Time passes, and little by little everything that we have spoken in falsehood becomes true.
-
A work in which there are theories is like an object which still has the ticket that shows its price.
-
The tiny, initial clue ... by allowing us to imagine what we do not know, stimulates a desire for knowledge.
-
The inertia of the mind urges it to slide down the easy slope of imagination, rather than to climb the steep slope of introspection.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Everybody calls "clear" those ideas which have the same degree of confusion as his own.
-
Let us be grateful to people who make us happy, they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.
-
Reality is never more than a first step towards an unknown on the road to which one can never progress very far.
-
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.