Marcel Proust Quotes

261 Sourced Quotes

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
Beauty is a sequence of hypotheses which ugliness cuts short when it bars the way that we could already see opening into the unknown.

Marcel Proust
I cannot express the uneasiness caused in me by this intrusion of mystery and beauty into a room I had at last filled with myself to the point of paying no more attention to the room than to that self. The anesthetizing influence of habit having ceased, I would begin to have thoughts, and feelings, and they are such sad things.

Marcel Proust
No doubt very few people understand the purely subjective nature of the phenomenon that we call love, or how it creates, so to speak, a supplementary person, distinct from the person whom the world knows by the same name, a person most of whose constituent elements are derived from ourselves.

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

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
I understood that all the material of a literary work was in my past life, I understood that I had acquired it in the midst of frivolous amusements, in idleness, in tenderness and in pain, stored up by me without my divining its destination or even its survival, as the seed has in reserve all the ingredients which will nourish the plant.

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
Only through art can we get outside of ourselves and know another's view of the universe which is not the same as ours and see landscapes which would otherwise have remained unknown to us like the landscapes of the moon. Thanks to art, instead of seeing a single world, our own, we see it multiply until we have before us as many worlds as there are original artists.

Marcel Proust
We ought at least, from prudence, never to speak of ourselves, because that is a subject on which we may be sure that other people's views are never in accordance with our own.

Marcel Proust
Habit! that skilful but slow-moving arranger who begins by letting our minds suffer for weeks on end in temporary quarters, but whom our minds are none the less only too happy to discover at last, for without it, reduced to their own devices, they would be powerless to make any room seem habitable.

Marcel Proust
This labor of the artist to discover a means of apprehending beneath matter and experience, beneath words, something different from their appearance, is of an exactly contrary nature to the operation in which pride, passion, intelligence and habit are constantly engaged within us when we spend our lives without self-communion, accumulating as though to hide our true impressions, the terminology for practical ends which we falsely call life.

Marcel Proust
Those whose suffering is due to love are, as we say of certain invalids, their own physicians.

Marcel Proust
A work in which there are theories is like an object which still has its price-tag on it.

Marcel Proust
There is nothing like desire for preventing the things one says from bearing any resemblance to what one has in one's mind.

Marcel Proust
The creation of the world did not occur at the beginning of time, it occurs every day.

Marcel Proust
The reason why life may be judged to be trivial although at certain moments it seems to us so beautiful is that we form our judgment, ordinarily, not on the evidence of life itself but of those quite different images which preserve nothing of life-and therefore we judge it disparagingly.

Marcel Proust
They like my books better in England than in France; a translation would be very successful there.

Marcel Proust
Reality is never more than a first step towards an unknown on the road to which one can never progress very far.

Marcel Proust
An hour or so later he received a note from Odette. Swann had left his cigarette case at her house. "If only," she wrote, "you had also forgotten your heart! I should never have let you have it back.

Marcel Proust
It is not only by dint of lying to others, but also of lying to ourselves, that we cease to notice that we are lying.

Marcel Proust
We can only be faithful to what we remember, and we remember only what we have known.

Marcel Proust
A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left.

Marcel Proust
As soon as he ceased to be mad he became merely stupid. There are maladies we must not seek to cure because they alone protect us from others that are more serious.

Marcel Proust
All the great things we know have come to us from neurotics. It is they and only they who have founded religions and created great works of art.

Marcel Proust