Marcel Proust - Mind Quotes

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Having a body is in itself the greatest threat to the mind... The body encloses the mind in a fortress; before long the mind is besieged on all sides, and in the end the mind has to give itself up.

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
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
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
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 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
Habit! that skilful but slow-moving arranger who begins by letting our minds suffer for weeks on end in temporary quarters, but whom our minds are none the less only too happy to discover at last, for without it, reduced to their own devices, they would be powerless to make any room seem habitable.

Marcel Proust
Masterpieces are no more than the shipwrecked flotsam of great minds.

Marcel Proust
It is the tragedy of other people that they are to us merely showcases for the very perishable collections of our own mind.

Marcel Proust
Our intellect is not the most subtle, the most powerful, the most appropriate, instrument for revealing the truth. It is life that, little by little, example by example, permits us to see that what is most important to our heart, or to our mind, is learned not by reasoning but through other agencies.

Marcel Proust
Happiness is beneficial for the body but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.

Marcel Proust
The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it....

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
What an abyss of uncertainty, whenever the mind feels overtaken by itself; when it, the seeker, is at the same time the dark region through which it must go seeking and where all its equipment will avail it nothing. Seek? More than that: create. It is face to face with something which does not yet exist, which it alone can make actual, which it alone can bring into the light of day.

Marcel Proust
There is nothing like desire for preventing the things one says from bearing any resemblance to what one has in one's mind.

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

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
It is always thus, impelled by a state of mind which is destined not to last, that we make our irrevocable decisions.

Marcel Proust
Our virtues themselves are not free and floating qualities over which we retain a permanent control and power of disposal; they come to be so closely linked in our minds with the actions in conjunction with which we make it our duty to practice them, that, if we are suddenly called upon to perform some action of a different order, it takes us by surprise, and without our supposing for a moment that it might involve the bringing of those very same virtues into play.

Marcel Proust