Marcel Proust Quotes

261 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

Marcel Proust
It is the tragedy of other people that they are to us merely showcases for the very perishable collections of our own mind.

Marcel Proust
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.

Marcel Proust
She's got feet like boats, whiskers like an American, and her undies are filthy.

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
Perhaps the immobility of the things that surround us is forced upon them by our conviction that they are themselves, and not anything else, and by the immobility of our conceptions of them.

Marcel Proust
Reading...that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.

Marcel Proust
The opinions which we hold of one another, our relations with friends and kinsfolk are in no sense permanent, save in appearance, but are as eternally fluid as the sea itself.

Marcel Proust
Once I had recognized the taste of the crumb of madeleine soaked in her decoction of lime flowers which my aunt used to give me... immediately the old gray house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like the scenery of a theater.

Marcel Proust
A sort of egotistical self-evaluation is unavoidable in those joys in which erudition and art mingle and in which aesthetic pleasure may become more acute, but not remain as pure.

Marcel Proust
Similarly the men who produce works of genius are not those who live in the most delicate atmosphere, whose conversation is most brilliant, or their culture broadest, but those who have had the power, ceasing in a moment to live only for themselves, to make use of their personality as of a mirror.

Marcel Proust
Illness is the most heeded of doctors: to kindness and wisdom we make promises only; pain we obey.

Marcel Proust
Only imagination and belief can differentiate from the rest certain objects, certain people, and can create an atmosphere.

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
We exist only by virtue of what we possess, we possess only what is really present to us, and many of our memories, our moods, our ideas sail away on a voyage of their own until they are lost to sight! Then we can no longer take them into account in the total which is our personality. But they know of secret paths by which to return to us.

Marcel Proust
One must never miss an opportunity of quoting things by others which are always more interesting than those one thinks up oneself.

Marcel Proust
We strive all the time to give our life its form, but we do so by copying willy-nilly, like a drawing, the features of the person that we are and not of the person we should like to be.

Marcel Proust
The particulars of life do not matter to the artist; they merely provide him with the opportunity to lay bare his genius.

Marcel Proust
The truth is that men can have several sorts of pleasure. The true pleasure is the one for which they abandon the other.

Marcel Proust
The courage of one's opinions is always a form of calculating cowardice in the eyes of the "other side.

Marcel Proust
If there is one thing more difficult than submitting oneself to a regime it is refraining from imposing it on other people.

Marcel Proust
A man may have spent his life among the great ones of the earth, who to him have been merely boring relatives or tedious acquaintances because a familiarity engendered in the cradle had stripped them of all glamour in his eyes.

Marcel Proust
Proust was the greatest novelist of the twentieth century, just as Tolstoy was in the nineteenth.

Marcel Proust
Existence is of little interest save on days when the dust of realities is mingled with magic sand.

Marcel Proust