Marcel Proust Quotes

261 Sourced Quotes

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
Love is space and time made tender to the heart.
In French: L'amour, c'est l'espace et le temps rendus sensibles au coeur.

Marcel Proust
For often I have wished to see a person again without realising that it was simply because that personal recalled to me a hedge of hawthorns in blossom, and I have been led to believe, and to make someone else believe, in a renewal of affection, by what was no more than an inclination to travel.

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
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
So long as I know what's boiling in my pot I don't bother my head about what's in other people's.

Marcel Proust
Reading...that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.

Marcel Proust
Not caring for their lives' is it? Why, what in the world is there that we should care for if it's not our lives, the only gift the Lord never offers us a second time.

Marcel Proust
We passionately long that there may be another life in which we shall be similar to what we are here below. But we do not pause to reflect that, even without waiting for that other life, in this life, after a few years we are unfaithful to what we have been, to what we wished to remain immortally.

Marcel Proust
Perhaps it is not-being that is the true state, and all our dream of life is inexistent; but, if so, we feel that these phrases of music, these conceptions which exist in relation to our dream, must be nothing either. We shall perish, but we have as hostages these divine captives who will follow and share our fate. And death in their company is somehow less bitter, less inglorious, perhaps even less probable.

Marcel Proust
Aristocracy is a relative thing. And there are plenty of out-of-the-way places where the son of an upholsterer is the arbiter of fashion and reigns over a court like any young Prince of Wales.

Marcel Proust
What artists call posterity is the posterity of the work of art.

Marcel Proust
Like many intellectuals, he was incapable of saying a simple thing in a simple way.

Marcel Proust
According to a charming law of nature which is evident even in the most sophisticated societies, we live in complete ignorance of whatever we love.

Marcel Proust
The paradoxes of today are the prejudices of tomorrow, since the most benighted and the most deplorable prejudices have had their moment of novelty when fashion lent them its fragile grace.

Marcel Proust
Perhaps the immobility of the things that surround us is forced upon them by our conviction that they are themselves, and not anything else, and by the immobility of our conceptions of them.

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

Marcel Proust
The truth is that every morning war is declared afresh. And the men who wish to continue it are as guilty as the men who began it, more guilty perhaps, for the latter perhaps did not foresee all its horrors.

Marcel Proust
By art alone we are able to get outside ourselves, to know what another sees of this universe which for him is not ours, the landscapes of which would remain as unknown to us as those of the moon. Thanks to art, instead of seeing one world, our own, we see it multiplied and as many original artists as there are, so many worlds are at our disposal, differing more widely from each other than those which roll round the infinite.

Marcel Proust
To think that I've wasted years of my life, that I've longed to die, that I've experienced my greatest love for a woman who didn't appeal to me, who wasn't even my type!

Marcel Proust
For a long time I would go to bed early.
[Fr., Longtemps, je me suis couche de bonne heure.]

Marcel Proust
There are mountainous, arduous days, up which one takes an infinite time to climb, and downward-sloping days which one can descend at full tilt, singing as one goes.

Marcel Proust
[Music] a pederast might hum when raping a choirboy.

Marcel Proust
For if unhappiness develops the forces of the mind, happiness alone is salutary to the body.

Marcel Proust
And so it is with our own past. It is a labour in vain to attempt to recapture it: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile. The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) of which we have no inkling. And it depends on chance whether or not we come upon this object before we ourselves must die.

Marcel Proust