Marcel Proust Quotes (123 Quotes)

Words do not change their meanings so drastically in the course of centuries as, in our minds, names do in the course of a year or two.

The human plagiarism which is most difficult to avoid, for individuals... is the plagiarism of ourselves.

Things don't change, but by and by our wishes change.

Illness is the doctor to whom we pay most heed; to kindness, to knowledge, we make promise only; pain we obey.

The only thing that does not change is that at any and every time it appears that there have been great changes

People who are not in love fail to understand how an intelligent man can suffer because of a very ordinary woman. This is like being surprised that anyone should be stricken with cholera because of a creature so insignificant as the comma bacillus.

It is seldom indeed that one parts on good terms, because if one were on good terms, one would not part

The paradoxes of today are the prejudices of tomorrow, since the most benighted and the most deplorable prejudices have had their moment of novelty when fashion lent them its fragile grace.

We say that the hour of death cannot be forecast, but when we say this we imagine that hour as placed in an obscure and distant future. It never occurs to us that it has any connection with the day already begun or that death could arrive this same afternoon, this afternoon which is so certain and which has every hour filled in advance.

Your soul is a dark forest. But the trees are of a particular species, they are genealogical trees.

The time at our disposal each day is elastic; the passions we feel dilate it, those that inspire us shrink it, and habit fills it.

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.

A change in the weather is sufficient to recreate the world and ourselves.

We must never be afraid to go too far, for truth lies beyond.

Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.

No exile at the South Pole or on the summit of Mont Blanc separates us more effectively from others than the practice of a hidden vice.

The moments of the past do not remain still they retain in our memory the motion which drew them towards the future, towards a future which has itself become the past, and draw us on in their train.

All our final decisions are made in a state of mind that is not going to last.

The stellar universe is not so difficult of comprehension as the real actions of other people.

If only for the sake of elegance, I try to remain morally pure.

We become moral when we are unhappy.

The true paradises are paradises we have lost.

It is always during a passing state of mind that we make lasting resolutions.

Our intellect is not the most subtle, the most powerful, the most appropriate, instrument for revealing the truth. It is life that, little by little, example by example, permits us to see that what is most important to our heart, or to our mind, is learned not by reasoning but through other agencies. Then it is that the intellect, observing their superiority, abdicates its control to them upon reasoned grounds and agrees to become their collaborator and lackey.

Life is extraordinarily suave and sweet with certain natural, witty, affectionate people who have unusual distinction and are capable of every vice, but who make a display of none in public and about whom no one can affirm they have a single one. There is something supple and secret about them. Besides, their perversity gives spice to their most innocent occupations, such as taking a walk in the garden at night.

There's nothing like desire to prevent the things one says from having any resemblance to the things in one's mind.

Though time changes people, it does not alter the image we have kept of them.

Love is a reciprocal torture.

A powerful idea communicates some of its power to the man who contradicts it

A fashionable milieu is one in which everybody's opinion is made up of the opinion of all the others. Has everybody a different opinion? Then it is a literary milieu.

A woman one loves rarely suffices for all our needs, so we deceive her with another whom we do not love.

Like many intellectuals, he was incapable of saying a simple thing in a simple way.

The only true voyage of discovery is not to go to new places, but to have other eyes.

Cannot come, lie follows.

Neurosis has an absolute genius for malingering. There is no illness which it cannot counterfeit perfectly. If it is capable of deceiving the doctor, how should it fail to deceive the patient

Three-quarters of the sicknesses of intelligent people come from their intelligence. They need at least a doctor who can understand this sickness.

The literary figure who looms largest in False Papers ... perfected a language ... and a vision that gave memory an introspection and aesthetic scope and magnitude no author had conferred on either before. He allowed intimacy itself to become an art form.

A cathedral, a wave of storm, a dancer's leap, never turn out to be as high as we had hoped.

It is in moments of illness that we are compelled to recognize that we live not alone but chained to a creature of a different kingdom, whole worlds apart, who has no knowledge of us and by whom it is impossible to make ourselves understood: our body.

There can be no piece of mind in love, since the advantage one has secured is never anything but a fresh starting-point for future desires

It has been said that beauty brings a promise of happiness, but it could be otherwise that the possibility of joy is the beginning of beauty.

Illness is the most heeded of doctors to goodness and wisdom we only make promises pain we obey

What a profound significance small things assume when the woman we love conceals them from us.

What artists call posterity is the posterity of the work of art.

The only paradise is paradise lost.

That translucent alabaster of our memories.

It is comforting when one has a sorrow to lie in the warmth of one's bed and there, abandoning all effort and all resistance, to bury even one's head under the cover, giving one's self up to it completely, moaning like branches in the autumn wind. But there is still a better bed, full of divine odors. It is our sweet, our profound, our impenetrable friendship.

People can have many different kinds of pleasure. The real one is that for which they will forsake the others.

In reality, in love there is a permanent suffering which joy neutralizes, renders virtual, delays, but which can at any moment become what it would have become long earlier if one had not obtained what one wanted, atrocious

But this does not exempt the sane from a feeling of alarm when a madman who has composed a sublime poem, after explaining to them in the most logical fashion that he has been shut up by mistake through his wife's machinations, imploring them to intercede for him with the governor of the asylum, complaining of the promiscuous company that is forced upon him, concludes as follows 'You see that man in the courtyard, who I'm obliged to put up with he thinks he's Jesus Christ. That should give you an idea of the sort of lunatics I've been shut up with he can't be Jesus Christ, because I'm Jesus Christ' A moment earlier, you were on the point of going to assure the psychiatrist that a mistake had been made. On hearing these words, even if you bear in mind the admirable poem at which this same man is working every day, you shrink from him....