Mariana Ramirez > Mariana's Quotes

“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

“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

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

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

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

“If we are to make reality endurable, we must all nourish a fantasy or two.”
― Marcel Proust, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower

“Love is space and time measured by the heart.”
― 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, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower

“It is our imagination that is responsible for love, not the other person.”
― Marcel Proust

“I think that life would suddenly seem wonderful to us if we were threatened to die as you say. Just think of how many projects, travels, love affairs, studies, it–our life–hides from us, made invisible by our laziness which, certain of a future, delays them incessantly.

‘But let all this threaten to become impossible for ever, how beautiful it would become again! Ah! If only the cataclysm doesn’t happen this time, we won’t miss visiting the new galleries of the Louvre, throwing ourselves at the feet of Miss X, making a trip to India.

‘The cataclysm doesn’t happen, we don’t do any of it, because we find ourselves back in the heart of normal life, where negligence deadens desire. And yet we shouldn’t have needed the cataclysm to love life today. It would have been enough to think that we are humans, and that death may come this evening.”
― Marcel Proust

“There is no man...however wise, who has not at some period in his youth said things, or lived a life, the memory of which is so unpleasant to him that he would gladly expunge it. And yet he ought not entirely to regret it, because he cannot be certain that he has indeed become a wise man...”
― Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past: Volume I - Swann's Way & Within a Budding Grove

“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, Time Regained