Marcel Proust Quotes

261 Sourced Quotes

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

Marcel Proust
One of those telegrams of which M. de Guermantes had wittily fixed the formula: 'Cannot come, lie follows'.

Marcel Proust
The loss of a sense adds as much beauty to the world as its acquisition.

Marcel Proust
On no days of our childhood did we live so fully perhaps as those we thought we had left behind without living them, those that we spent with a favorite book.

Marcel Proust
It has been said that beauty is a promise of happiness. Conversely, the possibility of pleasure can be a beginning of beauty.

Marcel Proust
Even from the simplest, the most realistic point of view, the countries which we long for occupy, at any given moment, a far larger place in our actual life than the country in which we happen to be.

Marcel Proust
May you always see a blue sky overhead, my young friend; and then, even when the time comes, as it has come for me now, when the woods are black, when night is fast falling, you will be able to console yourself, as I do, by looking up at the sky.

Marcel Proust
Are not the thoughts of the dying often turned towards the practical, painful, obscure, visceral aspect, towards the "seamy side" of death which is, as it happens, the side that death actually presents to them and forces them to feel, and which far more closely resembles a crushing burden, a difficulty in breathing, a destroying thirst, than the abstract idea to which we are accustomed to give the name of Death?

Marcel Proust
Fashions, being themselves begotten of the desire for change, are quick to change also.

Marcel Proust
In this way, the mansions arranged along either bank of the canal made one think of objects of nature, but of a nature which seemed to have created its works with a human imagination.

Marcel Proust
It is often hard to bear the tears that we ourselves have caused.

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

Marcel Proust
An hour is not merely an hour, it is a vase full of scents and sounds and projects and climates.

Marcel Proust
I believe that all true art is classic, but the dictates of the mind rarely permit of its being recognized as such when it first appears.

Marcel Proust
For although we know that the years pass, that youth gives way to old age, that fortunes and thrones crumble (even the most solid among them) and that fame is transitory, the manner in which—by means of a sort of snapshot—we take cognisance of this moving universe whirled along by Time, has the contrary effect of immobilising it.

Marcel Proust
Daughters of the attitude that produced them, certain women will not appeal to us without the double bed in which we find peace by their side, while others, to be caressed with a more secret intention, require leaves blown by the wind, water rippling in the dark, things as light and fleeting as they are.

Marcel Proust
There are people whose faces assume an unaccustomed beauty and majesty the moment they cease to look out of their eyes.

Marcel Proust
Masterpieces are no more than the shipwrecked flotsam of great minds.

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
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