Marcel Proust Quotes

261 Sourced Quotes

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
People who laugh so heartily at what they themselves have said, when it is not funny, dispense us accordingly, by taking upon themselves the responsibility for the mirth, from joining in it.

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

Marcel Proust
The truth has no need to be uttered to be made apparent, and... one may perhaps gather it with more certainty, without waiting for words and without even taking any account of them, from countless outward signs, even from certain invisible phenomena, analogous in the sphere of human character to what atmospheric changes are in the physical world.

Marcel Proust
A sleeping man holds in a circle around him the thread of the hours, the order of years and of worlds. He consults them instinctively upon awaking and in one second reads in them the point of the earth that he occupies, the time past until his arousal; but their ranks can be mingled or broken.

Marcel Proust
At the heart of our friendly or purely social relations, there lurks a hostility momentarily cured but recurring by fits and starts.

Marcel Proust
Friendship is in the end no more than: "... a lie which seeks to make us believe that we are not irremediably alone."

Marcel Proust
When one becomes for an instant one's former self, that is to say different from what one has been for some time past, one's sensibility, being no longer dulled by habit, receives from the slightest stimulus vivid impressions which make everything that has preceded them fade into insignificance, impressions to which, because of their intensity, we attach ourselves with the momentary enthusiasm of a drunkard.

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

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

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
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
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
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