Marcel Proust - Love Quotes

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A woman one loves rarely suffices for all our needs, so we deceive her with another whom we do not love.

Marcel Proust
In a separation it is the one who is not really in love who says the more tender things.

Marcel Proust
Love is space and time measured by the heart.

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
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
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
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
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
Possessing what one loves is an even greater joy than love itself.

Marcel Proust
When we are in love, our love is too big a thing for us to be able altogether to contain it within ourselves. It radiates towards the loved one, finds there a surface which arrests it, forcing it to return to its starting-point, and it is this repercussion of our own feeling which we call the other's feelings and which charms us more then than on its outward journey because we do not recognise it as having originated in ourselves.

Marcel Proust
When two people part it is the one who is not in love who makes the tender speeches.

Marcel Proust
For what we suppose to be our love or our jealousy is never a single, continuous and indivisible passion. It is composed of an infinity of successive loves, of different jealousies, each of which is ephemeral, although by their uninterrupted multiplicity they give us the impression of continuity, the illusion of unity.

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
Like everybody who is not in love, he imagined that one chose the person whom one loved after endless deliberations and on the strength of various qualities and advantages.

Marcel Proust
At that time, he was satisfying a sensual curiosity by experiencing the pleasures of people who live for love. He had believed he could stop there, that he would not be obliged to learn their sorrows; how small a thing her charm was for him now compared with the astounding terror that extended out from it like a murky halo, the immense anguish of not knowing at every moment what she had been doing, of not possessing her everywhere and always!

Marcel Proust
For, just as in the beginning it is formed by desire, so afterwards love is kept in existence only by painful anxiety.

Marcel Proust
Indeed, among the lesser auxiliaries to success in love, an absence, the declining of an invitation to dinner, an unintentional, unconscious harshness are of more service than all the cosmetics and fine clothes in the world.

Marcel Proust
A certain similarity exists, although the type evolves, between all the women we love, a similarity that is due to the fixity of our own temperament, which it is that chooses them, eliminating all those who would not be at once our opposite and our complement, fitted that is to say to gratify our senses and to wring our heart.

Marcel Proust
Those whose suffering is due to love are, as we say of certain invalids, their own physicians.

Marcel Proust
Love is a striking example of how little reality means to us.

Marcel Proust
There can be no peace of mind in love, since the advantage one has secured is never anything but a fresh starting-point for future desires.

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
We were resigned to suffering, thinking that we loved outside ourselves, and we perceive that our love is a function of our sorrow, that our love perhaps is our sorrow..

Marcel Proust
No doubt very few people understand the purely subjective nature of the phenomenon that we call love, or how it creates, so to speak, a supplementary person, distinct from the person whom the world knows by the same name, a person most of whose constituent elements are derived from ourselves.

Marcel Proust
People who, not being in love themselves, feel that a clever man should only be unhappy about a person who is worth his while; which is rather like being astonished that anyone should condescend to die of cholera at the bidding of so insignificant a creature as the common bacillus.

Marcel Proust
In his younger days a man dreams of possessing the heart of the woman whom he loves; later, the feeling that he possesses the heart of a woman may be enough to make him fall in love with her.

Marcel Proust
The bonds that unite another person to ourselves exist only in our mind. Memory as it grows fainter relaxes them, and notwithstanding the illusion by which we would fain be cheated and with which, out of love, friendship, politeness, deference, duty, we cheat other people, we exist alone. Man is the creature that cannot emerge from himself, that knows his fellows only in himself; when he asserts the contrary, he is lying.

Marcel Proust
Pleasures are like photographs: in the presence of the person we love, we take only negatives, which we develop later, at home, when we have at our disposal once more our inner dark room, the door of which it is strictly forbidden to open while others are present.

Marcel Proust