Marcel Proust Quotes

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

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

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.

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

Desire makes everything blossom; possession makes everything wither and fade.

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

Love is space and time measured by the heart.

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.

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.

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.

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

The only paradise is paradise lost.

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.

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

Happiness serves hardly any other purpose than to make unhappiness possible.

The charms of a passing woman are usually in direct relation to the speed of her passing."

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.

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

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

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

The bonds that unite another person to our self exist only in our mind.

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

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

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.

We do not succeed in changing things according to our desire, but gradually our desire changes.

There is no man, however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived in a way the consciousness of which is so unpleasant to him in later life that he would gladly, if he could, expunge it from his memory.

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.

A woman one loves rarely suffices for all our needs, so we deceive her with another whom we do not love.

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

Everything great that we know has come from neurotics… never will the world be aware of how much it owes to them, nor above all what they have suffered in order to bestow their gifts on it.

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.

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

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.

The fixity of a habit is generally in direct proportion to its absurdity.

The opinions which we hold of one another, our relations with friends and kinsfolk are in no sense permanent, save in appearance, but are as eternally fluid as the sea itself.

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.

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.

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