Marcel Proust Quotes

261 Sourced Quotes

There is probably no one, however rigid his virtue, who is not liable to find himself, by the complexity of circumstances, living at close quarters with the very vice which he himself has been most outspoken in condemning -- without altogether recognizing it beneath the disguise of ambiguous behavior which it assumes in his presence.

Marcel Proust
La possession de ce qu'on aime est une joie plus grande encore que l'amour. Possessing what one loves is an even greater joy than love itself.

Marcel Proust
The smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us.....

Marcel Proust
To a great extent, suffering is a sort of need felt by the organism to make itself familiar with a new state, which makes it uneasy, to adapt its sensibility to that state.

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
We have such numerous interests in our lives that it is not uncommon, on a single occasion, for the foundations of a happiness that does not yet exist to be laid down alongside the intensification of a grief from which we are still suffering.

Marcel Proust
One reads the papers as one wants to with a bandage over one's eyes without trying to understand the facts, listening to the soothing words of the editor as to the words of one s mistress.

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
An hour is not merely an hour, it is a vase full of scents and sounds and projects and climates.

Marcel Proust
For theories and schools, like microbes and corpuscles, devour one another and by their strife ensure the continuity of life.

Marcel Proust
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