Marcel Proust famous quotes

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.
-- Marcel Proust

#Inspirational #Life #Positive

Let us be grateful to people who make us happy, they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.
-- Marcel Proust

#Friendship #Happiness #Happy

My destination is no longer a place, rather a new way of seeing.
-- Marcel Proust

#Way #Destination

If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time.
-- Marcel Proust

#Love #Inspiring #Dream

There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book.
-- Marcel Proust

#Book #Reading #Childhood

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. Then it is that the intellect, observing their superiority, abdicates its control to them upon reasoned grounds and agrees to become their collaborator and lackey.
-- Marcel Proust

#Powerful #Heart #Intelligent

Do not wait for life. Do not long for it. Be aware, always and at every moment, that the miracle is in the here and now.
-- Marcel Proust

#Long #Waiting #Miracle

Let us be grateful to people who make us happy.
-- Marcel Proust

#Thank You #Gratitude #Appreciation

We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.
-- Marcel Proust

#Wisdom #Im Sorry #Educational

Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.
-- Marcel Proust

#Book #Reading #Kind

It is comforting when one has a sorrow to lie in the warmth of one's bed and there, abandoning all effort and all resistance, to bury even one's head under the cover, giving one's self up to it completely, moaning like branches in the autumn wind. But there is still a better bed, full of divine odors. It is our sweet, our profound, our impenetrable friendship.
-- Marcel Proust

#Sweet #Lying #Autumn

A change in the weather is sufficient to recreate the world and ourselves.
-- Marcel Proust

#Rainy Day #Weather #World

Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself. The writer's work is only a kind of optical instrument he provides the reader so he can discern what he might never have seen in himself without this book. The reader's recognition in himself of what the book says is the proof of the book's truth.
-- Marcel Proust

#Book #Might #Recognition

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

#Love #Dream #Fall

We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world.
-- Marcel Proust

#Wisdom #Learning #Journey

Like many intellectuals, he was incapable of saying a simple thing in a simple way.
-- Marcel Proust

#Simple #Stupidity #Intellectual

It is in moments of illness that we are compelled to recognize that we live not alone but chained to a creature of a different kingdom, whole worlds apart, who has no knowledge of us and by whom it is impossible to make ourselves understood: our body.
-- Marcel Proust

#Fitness #Cancer #Knowledge

These dreams reminded me that, since I wished some day to become a writer, it was high time to decide what sort of books I was going to write. But as soon as I asked myself the question, and tried to discover some subject to which I could impart a philosophical significance of infinite value, my mind would stop like a clock, my consciousness would be faced with a blank, I would feel either that I was wholly devoid of talent or perhaps that some malady of the brain was hindering its development.
-- Marcel Proust

#Dream #Book #Philosophical

It is often hard to bear the tears that we ourselves have caused.
-- Marcel Proust

#Inspirational #Anorexia #Tears

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

#Smell #Long #Soul

As long as men are free to ask what they must, free to say what they think, free to think what they will, freedom can never be lost and science can never regress.
-- Marcel Proust

#Freedom #Science #Thinking

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

#Love #Reality #Literature

The soldier is convinced that a certain indefinitely extendable time period is accorded him before he is killed, the burglar before he is caught, men in general, before they must die. That is the amulet which preserves individuals — and sometimes populations — not from danger, but from the fear of danger, in reality from the belief in danger, which in some cases allows them to brave it without being brave. Such a confidence, just as unfounded, supports the lover who counts on a reconciliation, a letter.
-- Marcel Proust

#Reality #Men #Brave

For although we know that the years pass, that youth gives way to old age, that fortunes and thrones crumble (even the most solid among them) and that fame is transitory, the manner in which—by means of a sort of snapshot—we take cognisance of this moving universe whirled along by Time, has the contrary effect of immobilising it.
-- Marcel Proust

#Moving #Mean #Years

All our final decisions are made in a state of mind that is not going to last.
-- Marcel Proust

#Decision #Entrepreneur #Mind

Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and composed our masterpieces.
-- Marcel Proust

#Religion #Literature #World

The time at our disposal each day is elastic; the passions we feel dilate it, those that inspire us shrink it, and habit fills it.
-- Marcel Proust

#Passion #Inspire #Each Day

Love is a reciprocal torture.
-- Marcel Proust

#Love #Love Is #Literature

Only through art can we emerge from ourselves and know what another person sees.
-- Marcel Proust

#Art #Persons

Instead of seeking new landscapes, develop new eyes.
-- Marcel Proust

#Wisdom #Eye #Landscape

The character we exhibit in the latter half of our life need not necessarily be, though it often is, our original character, developed further, dried up, exaggerated, or diminished. It can be its exact opposite, like a suit worn inside out.
-- Marcel Proust

#Character #Opposites #Needs

Thanks to art, instead of seeing one world only, our own, we see that world multiply itself and we have at our disposal as many worlds as there are original artists, worlds more different one from the other than those which revolve in infinite space, worlds which, centuries after the extinction of the fire from which their light first emanated, whether it is called Rembrandt or Vermeer, send us still each one its special radiance.
-- Marcel Proust

#Art #Light #Space

with one image he would make that beauty explode into me.
-- Marcel Proust

Our passions shape our books, repose writes them in the intervals.
-- Marcel Proust

#Book #Passion #Writing

Our memory is like a shop in the window of which is exposed now one, now another photograph of the same person. And as a rule the most recent exhibit remains for some time the only one to be seen.
-- Marcel Proust

#Memories #Window #Photograph

Love is not vain because it is frustrated, but because it is fulfilled. The people we love turn to ashes when we posess them.
-- Marcel Proust

#Love Is #People #Frustrated

There is no more ridiculous custom than the one that makes you express sympathy once and for all on a given day to a person whose sorrow will endure as long as his life. Such grief, felt in such a way is always present, it is never too late to talk about it, never repetitious to mention it again.
-- Marcel Proust

#Grief #Long #Sorrow

No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me.
-- Marcel Proust

#Liquid #Crumbs #Palate

Love...., ever unsatisfied, lives always in the moment that is about to come.
-- Marcel Proust

#Moments #Unsatisfied

The only true voyage of discovery, . . . would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes.
-- Marcel Proust

#Life #Travel #Eye

Everything we think of as great has come to us from neurotics. It is they and they alone who found religions and create great works of art. The world will never realize how much it owes to them and what they have suffered in order to bestow their gifts on it.
-- Marcel Proust

#Depression #Art #Thinking

People who are not in love fail to understand how an intelligent man can suffer because of a very ordinary woman. This is like being surprised that anyone should be stricken with cholera because of a creature so insignificant as the common bacillus.
-- Marcel Proust

#Love #Men #Intelligent

Illness is the most heeded of doctors: to goodness and wisdom we only make promises; pain we obey.
-- Marcel Proust

#Pain #Health #Doctors

Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.
-- Marcel Proust

#Memories #Past #Remembrance

We are at times too ready to believe that the present is the only possible state of things.
-- Marcel Proust

#Believe #States #Openness

The only true voyage, the only bath in the Fountain of Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them sees, that each of them is; and this we do [with great artists]; with artists like these we do really fly from star to star.
-- Marcel Proust

#Stars #Eye #Artist

For each illness that doctors cure with medicine, they provoke ten in healthy people by inoculating them with the virus that is a thousand times more powerful than any microbe: the idea that one is ill.
-- Marcel Proust

#Powerful #Ideas #Medicine

But sometimes the future is latent in us without our knowing it, and our supposedly lying words foreshadow an imminent reality.
-- Marcel Proust

#Lying #Reality #Knowing

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

#Past #Essence #Smell

Like everybody who is not in love, he thought one chose the person to be loved after endless deliberations and on the basis of particular qualities or advantages.
-- Marcel Proust

#Love #Quality #Literature

Lies are essential to humanity. They are perhaps as important as the pursuit of pleasure and moreover are dictated by that pursuit.
-- Marcel Proust

#Life #Success #Lying

The paradoxes of today are the prejudices of tomorrow, since the most benighted and the most deplorable prejudices have had their moment of novelty when fashion lent them its fragile grace.
-- Marcel Proust

#Fashion #Grace #Today

When you work to please others you can't succeed, but the things you do to satisfy yourself stand a chance of catching someone's interest.
-- Marcel Proust

#Succeed #Chance #Catching

We must never be afraid to go too far, for truth lies beyond.
-- Marcel Proust

#Motivational #Success #Lying

So we don't believe that life is beautiful because we don't recall it but if we get a whiff of a long-forgotten smell we are suddenly intoxicated and similarly we think we no longer love the dead because we don't remember them but if by chance we come across an old glove we burst into tears.
-- Marcel Proust

#Beautiful #Believe #Thinking

The tiny, initial clue ... by allowing us to imagine what we do not know, stimulates a desire for knowledge.
-- Marcel Proust

#Knowledge #Desire #Tiny

Our worst fears, like our greatest hopes, are not outside our powers, and we can come in the end to triumph over the former and to achieve the latter.
-- Marcel Proust

#Triumph #Achieve #Ends

It is not only by dint of lying to others, but also of lying to ourselves, that we cease to notice that we are lying.
-- Marcel Proust

#Lying

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

#Spring #Intelligent #People

She poured out Swann's tea, inquired "Lemon or cream?" and, on his answering "Cream, please," said to him with a laugh: "A cloud!" And as he pronounced it excellent, "You see, I know just how you like it." This tea had indeed seemed to Swann, just as it seemed to her; something precious, and love has such a need to find some justification for itself, some guarantee of duration, in pleasures which without it would have no existence and must cease with its passing.
-- Marcel Proust

#Clouds #Laughing #Tea

In reality, in love there is a permanent suffering which joy neutralizes, renders virtual delays, but which can at any moment become what it would have become long earlier if one had not obtained what one wanted -- atrocious.
-- Marcel Proust

#Heartbreak #Reality #Long

Three-quarters of the sicknesses of intelligent people come from their intelligence. They need at least a doctor who can understand this sickness.
-- Marcel Proust

#Intelligent #Gambling #Doctors

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

#Missing You #True Love #Best Love

To write that essential book, a great writer does not need to invent it but merely to translate it, since it already exists in each one of us. The duty and task of a writer are those of translator.
-- Marcel Proust

#Book #Humility #Writing

A powerful idea communicates some of its strength to him who challenges it.
-- Marcel Proust

#Inspirational #Strength #Powerful

...the memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment..
-- Marcel Proust

#Memories #Regret #Moments

Time passes, and little by little everything that we have spoken in falsehood becomes true.
-- Marcel Proust

#Time #Lying #Literature

If only for the sake of elegance, I try to remain morally pure.
-- Marcel Proust

#Luxury #Trying #Literature

Even from the simplest, the most realistic point of view, the countries which we long for occupy, at any given moment, a far larger place in our actual life than the country in which we happen to be.
-- Marcel Proust

#Country #Views #Long

The places we have known do not belong solely to the world of space in which we situate them for our greater convenience. They were only a thin slice among contiguous impressions which formed our life at that time; the memory of a certain image is but regret for a certain moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fleeting, alas, as the years.
-- Marcel Proust

#Memories #Regret #Space

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

#Mean #Reality #Love Is

Desire makes everything blossom; possession makes everything wither and fade.
-- Marcel Proust

#Desire #Possession

Illness is the doctor to whom we pay most heed; to kindness, to knowledge, we make promise only; pain we obey.
-- Marcel Proust

#Pain #Kindness #Doctors

If we are to make reality endurable, we must all nourish a fantasy or two.
-- Marcel Proust

#Reality #Two #Fantasy

Always try to keep a patch of sky above your life.
-- Marcel Proust

#Sky #Trying #Patches

Time, which changes people, does not alter the image we have retained of them.
-- Marcel Proust

#Change #Time #People

It comes so soon, the moment when there is nothing left to wait for.
-- Marcel Proust

#Waiting #Moments

We are healed from suffering only by experiencing it to the full.
-- Marcel Proust

#Grieving #Suffering #Healed

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

#Love Is #Anxiety #Desire

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

#Leadership #Sports #Time

It is always during a passing state of mind that we make lasting resolutions.
-- Marcel Proust

#Mind #Lasting Love #Resolution

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

#Death #Thinking #People

Reading is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.
-- Marcel Proust

#Communication #Reading #Miracle

If, I can someday see M. Claude Monet's garden, I feel sure that I shall see something that is not so much a garden of flowers as of colours and tones, less an old-fashioned flower garden than a colour garden, so to speak, one that achieves an effect not entirely nature's, because it was planted so that only the flowers with matching colours will bloom at the same time, harmonized in an infinite stretch of blue or pink.
-- Marcel Proust

#Flower #Garden #Blue

What barrier is so insurmountable as silence?
-- Marcel Proust

#Silence #Barriers #Insurmountable

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

#School #Strife #Theory

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

#Fashion #Son #Aristocracy

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

#Wall #Doe #Length

But,instead of what our imagination makes us suppose and which we worthless try to discover,life gives us something that we could hardly imagine.
-- Marcel Proust

#Giving #Imagination #Trying

When from a long distant past nothing subsists after the things are broken and scattered, the smell and taste of things remain.
-- Marcel Proust

#Food #Past #Smell

We say that the hour of death cannot be forecast, but when we say this we imagine that hour as placed in an obscure and distant future. It never occurs to us that it has any connection with the day already begun or that death could arrive this same afternoon, this afternoon which is so certain and which has every hour filled in advance.
-- Marcel Proust

#Death #Connections #Afternoon

Are not the thoughts of the dying often turned towards the practical, painful, obscure, visceral aspect, towards the "seamy side" of death which is, as it happens, the side that death actually presents to them and forces them to feel, and which far more closely resembles a crushing burden, a difficulty in breathing, a destroying thirst, than the abstract idea to which we are accustomed to give the name of Death?
-- Marcel Proust

#Crush #Death #Breathing

Perfume is that last and best reserve of the past, the one which when all out tears have run dry, can make us cry again!
-- Marcel Proust

#Running #Past #Tears

A cathedral, a wave of a storm, a dancer's leap, never turn out to be as high as we had hoped.
-- Marcel Proust

#Motivational #Dance #Storm

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

#Long #People #Pot

The bonds between ourselves and another person exists only in our minds. Memory as it grows fainter loosens them, and notwithstanding the illusion by which we want to be duped and which, out of love, friendship, politeness, deference, duty, we dupe other people, we exist alone. Man is the creature who cannot escape from himself, who knows other people only in himself, and when he asserts the contrary, he is lying.
-- Marcel Proust

#Memories #Lying #Men

One becomes moral as soon as one is unhappy.
-- Marcel Proust

#Unhappy #Moral

Dear Friend: I have nearly died three times since morning.
-- Marcel Proust

#Morning #Three #Dear Friend

An hour or so later he received a note from Odette. Swann had left his cigarette case at her house. "If only," she wrote, "you had also forgotten your heart! I should never have let you have it back.
-- Marcel Proust

#Heart #House #Forgotten

It has been said that beauty is a promise of happiness. Conversely, the possibility of pleasure can be a beginning of beauty.
-- Marcel Proust

#Beauty #Promise #Pleasure