Marcel Proust Quotes

261 Sourced Quotes

Conversation, which is friendship's mode of expression, is a superficial digression which gives us nothing worth acquiring. We may talk for a lifetime without doing more than indefinitely repeat the vacuity of a minute.

Marcel Proust
Certain favourite roles are played by us so often before the public and rehearsed so carefully when we are alone that we find it easier to refer to their fictitious testimony than to that of a reality which we have almost entirely forgotten.

Marcel Proust
For, medicine being a compendium of the successive and contradictory mistakes of medical practitioners, when we summon the wisest of them to our aid, the chances are that we may be relying on a scientific truth the error of which will be recognized in a few years' time.

Marcel Proust
Our passions shape our books, repose writes them in the intervals.

Marcel Proust
The great quality of true art is that it rediscovers, grasps and reveals to us that reality far from where we live, from which we get farther and farther away as the conventional knowledge we substitute for it becomes thicker and more impermeable.

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

Marcel Proust
When we have passed a certain age, the soul of the child we were and the souls of the dead from whom we have sprung come to lavish on us their riches and their spells.

Marcel Proust
We scornfully decline, because of one whom we love and who will some day be of so little account, to see another who is of no account to-day, with whom we shall be in love to-morrow, with whom we might, perhaps, had we consented to see her now, have fallen in love a little earlier and who would thus have put a term to our present sufferings, bringing others, it is true, in their place.

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

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
Griefs, at the moment when they change into ideas, lose some of their power to injure our heart.

Marcel Proust
Like a kaleidoscope which is every now and then given a turn, society arranges successively in different orders elements which one would have supposed immutable, and composes a new pattern.

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

Marcel Proust
Nobility is often no more than the inner aspect which our egotistical feelings assume when we have not yet named and classified them.

Marcel Proust
The images selected by memory are as arbitrary, as narrow, as elusive as those which the imagination had formed and reality has destroyed. There is no reason why, existing outside ourselves, a real place should conform to the pictures in our memory rather than those in our dreams.

Marcel Proust
I do my intellectual work inside myself, and once I am with my fellow creatures it is more or less a matter of indifference to me whether or not they are intelligent as long as they are kind, sincere, etc.

Marcel Proust
Our words are, as a general rule, filled by the people to whom we address them with a meaning which those people derive from their own substance, a meaning widely different from that which we had put into the same words when we uttered them.

Marcel Proust
A photograph acquires something of the dignity which it ordinarily lacks when it ceases to be a reproduction of reality and shows us things that no longer exist.

Marcel Proust
The inertia of the mind urges it to slide down the easy slope of imagination, rather than to climb the steep slope of introspection.

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