Marcel Proust Quotes on Man (8 Quotes)

The bonds between ourselves and another person exists only in our minds. Memory as it grows fainter loosens them, and notwithstanding the illusion by which we want to be duped and which, out of love, friendship, politeness, deference, duty, we dupe other people, we exist alone. Man is the creature who cannot escape from himself, who knows other people only in himself, and when he asserts the contrary, he is lying.

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.

Often it is just lack of imagination that keeps a man from suffering very much.

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.

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

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....

As long as men are free to ask what they must, free to say what they think, free to think what they will, freedom can never be lost and science can never regress.

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.