Marcel Proust Quotes

261 Sourced Quotes

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

Marcel Proust
If a little day-dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time.

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

Marcel Proust
In a separation it is the one who is not really in love who says the more tender things.

Marcel Proust
We do not succeed in changing things according to our desire, but gradually our desire changes. The situation that we hoped to change because it was intolerable becomes unimportant. We have not managed to surmount the obstacle, as we were absolutely determined to do, but life has taken us round it, led us past it, and then if we turn round to gaze at the remote past, we can barely catch sight of it, so imperceptible has it become.

Marcel Proust
Let us be grateful to people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.

Marcel Proust
Time passes, and little by little everything that we have spoken in falsehood becomes true.

Marcel Proust
The only true voyage of discovery... consists not in seeking new lands but in seeing with new eyes.

Marcel Proust
Neurosis has an absolute genius for malingering. There is no illness which it cannot counterfeit perfectly.

Marcel Proust
People who, not being in love themselves, feel that a clever man should only be unhappy about a person who is worth his while; which is rather like being astonished that anyone should condescend to die of cholera at the bidding of so insignificant a creature as the common bacillus.

Marcel Proust
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
We pack the physical outline of the creature we see with all the ideas we have already formed about him, and in the complete picture of him we compose in our minds those ideas have certainly the principal place.

Marcel Proust
A woman is of greater service to our life if she is in it, instead of being an element of happiness, an instrument of sorrow, and there is not a woman in the world the possession of whom is as precious as that of the truths which she reveals to us by causing us to suffer.

Marcel Proust
Our intonations contain our philosophy of life, what each of us is constantly telling himself about things.

Marcel Proust
The only true voyage of discovery, the only fountain of Eternal Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to behold the hundred universes that each of them beholds, that each of them is.

Marcel Proust
That melancholy which we feel when we cease to obey orders which, from one day to another, keep the future hidden, and realise that we have at last begun to live in real earnest, as a grown-up person, the life, the only life that any of us has at his disposal.

Marcel Proust
The thirst for something other than what we have... to bring something new, even if it is worse, some emotion, some sorrow; when our sensibility, which happiness has silenced like an idle harp, wants to resonate under some hand, even a rough one, and even if it might be broken by it.

Marcel Proust
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.

Marcel Proust
I had long since given up trying to extract from a woman as it were the square root of her unknown quantity, the mystery of which a mere introduction was generally enough to dispel.

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
Poets claim that we recapture for a moment the self that we were long ago when we enter some house or garden in which we used to live in our youth. But these are most hazardous pilgrimages, which end as often in disappointment as in success. It is in ourselves that we should rather seek to find those fixed places, contemporaneous with different years.

Marcel Proust
The heart changes...but we learn of it only from reading or by imagination; for in reality its alteration, like that of certain natural phenomena, is so gradual that, even if we are able to distinguish, successively, each of its different states, we are still spared the actual sensation of change.

Marcel Proust
Let us leave pretty women to men with no imagination.

Marcel Proust
As to the pretty girls who went past, from the day on which I had first known that their cheeks could be kissed, I had become curious about their souls. And the Universe had appeared to me more interesting.

Marcel Proust
We are all of us obliged, if we are to make reality endurable, to nurse a few little follies in ourselves.

Marcel Proust