Marcel Proust Quotes

261 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

Marcel Proust
The reason why a work of genius is not easily admired from the first is that the man who has created it is extraordinary, that few other men resemble him. It is his work itself that, by fertilising the rare minds capable of understanding it, will make them increase and multiply.

Marcel Proust
For a long time I would go to bed early.
In French: Longtemps, je me suis couche de bonne heure.

Marcel Proust
We shall see later on that the diversity of the forms of death that circulate invisibly is the cause of the peculiar unexpectedness of obituary notices in the newspapers.

Marcel Proust
The artist who gives up an hour of work for an hour of conversation with a friend knows that he is sacrificing a reality for something that does not exist.

Marcel Proust
We may have revolved every possible idea in our minds, and yet the truth has never occurred to us, and it is from without, when we are least expecting it, that it gives us its cruel stab and wounds us forever.

Marcel Proust
The duty and the task of a writer are those of an interpreter.

Marcel Proust
We are less justified in saying that the thinking life of humanity is a miraculous perfectioning of animal and physical life than that it is an imperfection in the organization of spiritual life as rudimentary as the communal existence of protozoa in colonies.

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
Let a prize lower my position, if it causes me to be read; that I prefer immediately to all the honors.

Marcel Proust
We must love men more than things, and I admire and weep more for the soldiers than for the churches which were only the recording of an heroic gesture which today is reenacted at every moment.

Marcel Proust
A woman whom we need and who makes us suffer elicits from us a whole gamut of feelings far more profound and vital than a man of genius who interests us.

Marcel Proust
After a certain age, the more one becomes oneself, the more obvious one's family traits become.

Marcel Proust
Sometimes in this life, under the stress of an exceptional emotion, people do say what they think.

Marcel Proust
We construct our lives for one person, and when at length it is ready to receive her that person does not come; presently she is dead to us, and we live on, prisoners within the walls which were intended only for her.

Marcel Proust
And indeed when we are no longer in love with women whom we meet after many years, is there not the abyss of death between them and ourselves, just as much as if they were no longer of this world, since the fact that we are no longer in love makes the people that they were or the person that we were then as good as dead?

Marcel Proust
And so when studying faces, we do indeed measure them, but as painters, not as surveyors.

Marcel Proust
For every sin there is forgiveness, and especially for the sins of youth.

Marcel Proust
Habit is, of all the plants of human growth, the one that has the least need of nutritious soil in order to live, and is the first to appear on the most seemingly barren rock.

Marcel Proust
Women who are to some extent resistant, whom one cannot possess at once, whom one does not even know at first whether one will ever possess, are the only interesting ones.

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
Certainly, it is more reasonable to devote one's life to women than to postage stamps or old snuff-boxes, even to pictures or statues. But the example of other collections should be a warning to us to diversify, to have not one woman only but several.

Marcel Proust
But to ask pity of our body is like discoursing in front of an octopus, for which our words can have no more meaning than the sound of the tides, and with which we should be appalled to find ourselves condemned to live.

Marcel Proust
There is in this world in which everything wears out, everything perishes, one thing that crumbles into dust, that destroys itself still more completely, leaving behind still fewer traces of itself than Beauty: namely Grief.

Marcel Proust