Marcel Proust > Quotes

“Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.”
― Marcel Proust

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

“Always try to keep a patch of sky above your life.”
― Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way

“Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.”
― Marcel Proust

“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, Time Regained

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

“Love is a striking example of how little reality means to us.”
― Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time

“Let us leave pretty women to men with no imagination.”
― Marcel Proust, The Captive / The Fugitive

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

“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

“Reading is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.”
― Proust-M

“We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full.”
― Marcel Proust

“The true paradises are the paradises that we have lost.”
― Marcel Proust

“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, Remembrance of Things Past Volumes 1-3 Box Set

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

“Like many intellectuals, he was incapable of saying a simple thing in a simple way”
― Marcel Proust

“Desire makes everything blossom; possession makes everything wither and fade. ”
― 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

“Now there is one thing I can tell you: you will enjoy certain pleasures you would not fathom now. When you still had your mother you often thought of the days when you would have her no longer. Now you will often think of days past when you had her. When you are used to this horrible thing that they will forever be cast into the past, then you will gently feel her revive, returning to take her place, her entire place, beside you. At the present time, this is not yet possible. Let yourself be inert, wait till the incomprehensible power ... that has broken you restores you a little, I say a little, for henceforth you will always keep something broken about you. Tell yourself this, too, for it is a kind of pleasure to know that you will never love less, that you will never be consoled, that you will constantly remember more and more.”
― Marcel Proust

“There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we believe we left without having lived them, those we spent with a favorite book.”
― Marcel Proust, Days of Reading

“Time, which changes people, does not alter the image we have of them.”
― Marcel Proust

“Everything great in the world is done by neurotics; they alone founded our religions and created our masterpieces.”
― Marcel Proust

“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

“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. The lives that you admire, the attitudes that seem noble to you, have not been shaped by a paterfamilias or a schoolmaster, they have sprung from very different beginnings, having been influenced by evil or commonplace that prevailed round them. They represent a struggle and a victory.”
― Marcel Proust

“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, In Search of Lost Time

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

“The thirst for something other than what we have…to bring something new, even if it is worse, some emotion, some sorrow; when our sensibility, which happiness has silenced like an idle harp, wants to resonate under some hand, even a rough one, and even if it might be broken by it.”
― Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way

“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, Remembrance of Things Past: Volume II - The Guermantes Way & Cities of the Plain

“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

“Now are the woods all black,
But still the sky is blue.”
― Marcel Proust , Swann’s Way