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
We construct our lives for one person, and when at length it is ready to receive her that person does not come; presently she is dead to us, and we live on, prisoners within the walls which were intended only for her.

Marcel Proust
And indeed when we are no longer in love with women whom we meet after many years, is there not the abyss of death between them and ourselves, just as much as if they were no longer of this world, since the fact that we are no longer in love makes the people that they were or the person that we were then as good as dead?

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

Marcel Proust
For every sin there is forgiveness, and especially for the sins of youth.

Marcel Proust
The reason why a work of genius is not easily admired from the first is that the man who has created it is extraordinary, that few other men resemble him. It is his work itself that, by fertilising the rare minds capable of understanding it, will make them increase and multiply.

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
I had long since given up trying to extract from a woman as it were the square root of her unknown quantity, the mystery of which a mere introduction was generally enough to dispel.

Marcel Proust
The real stars of society are tired of appearing there. He who is curious to gaze at them must often migrate to another hemisphere, where they are more or less alone.

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
Unkind people imagine themselves to be inflicting pain on someone equally unkind.

Marcel Proust
Life is extraordinarily suave and sweet with certain natural, witty, affectionate people who have unusual distinction and are capable of every vice, but who make a display of none in public and about whom no one can affirm they have a single one. There is something supple and secret about them. Besides, their perversity gives spice to their most innocent occupations, such as taking a walk in the garden at night.

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
A picture's beauty does not depend on the things portrayed in it.

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
As to the pretty girls who went past, from the day on which I had first known that their cheeks could be kissed, I had become curious about their souls. And the Universe had appeared to me more interesting.

Marcel Proust
Certainly, it is more reasonable to devote one's life to women than to postage stamps or old snuff-boxes, even to pictures or statues. But the example of other collections should be a warning to us to diversify, to have not one woman only but several.

Marcel Proust
Habit is, of all the plants of human growth, the one that has the least need of nutritious soil in order to live, and is the first to appear on the most seemingly barren rock.

Marcel Proust
It is a mistake to speak of a bad choice in love, since, as soon as a choice exists, it can only be bad.

Marcel Proust
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
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