Marcel Proust Quotes on Mind (12 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.

Impelled by a state of mind which is destined not to last, we make our irrevocable decisions

Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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....

The bonds that unite another person to our self exist only in our mind.

It is always thus, impelled by a state of mind which is destined not to last, that we make our irrevocable decisions