Marcel Proust - People Quotes

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Let us be grateful to people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.

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

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
Sometimes in this life, under the stress of an exceptional emotion, people do say what they think.

Marcel Proust
Our words are, as a general rule, filled by the people to whom we address them with a meaning which those people derive from their own substance, a meaning widely different from that which we had put into the same words when we uttered them.

Marcel Proust
We ought at least, from prudence, never to speak of ourselves, because that is a subject on which we may be sure that other people's views are never in accordance with our own.

Marcel Proust
If there is one thing more difficult than submitting oneself to a regime it is refraining from imposing it on other people.

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
People who laugh so heartily at what they themselves have said, when it is not funny, dispense us accordingly, by taking upon themselves the responsibility for the mirth, from joining in it.

Marcel Proust
Only imagination and belief can differentiate from the rest certain objects, certain people, and can create an atmosphere.

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

Marcel Proust
People wish to learn to swim and at the same time to keep one foot on the ground.

Marcel Proust
Nine tenths of the ills from which intelligent people suffer spring from their intellect.

Marcel Proust
There are people whose faces assume an unaccustomed beauty and majesty the moment they cease to look out of their eyes.

Marcel Proust
Even in the most insignificant details of our daily life, none of us can be said to constitute a material whole, which is identical for everyone, and need only be turned up like a page in an account-book or the record of a will; our social personality is created by the thoughts of other people.

Marcel Proust
People don't know when they are happy. They're never so unhappy as they think they are.

Marcel Proust
But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.

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
It is not because other people are dead that our affection for them grows faint, it is because we ourselves are dying.

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
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
People do not die for us immediately, but remain bathed in a sort of aura of life which bears no relation to true immortality but through which they continue to occupy our thoughts in the same way as when they were alive. It is as though they were traveling abroad.

Marcel Proust