Marcel Proust quotes - page 3

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)
We are able to find everything in our memory, which is like a dispensary or chemical laboratory in which chance steers our hand sometimes to a soothing drug and sometimes to a dangerous poison.
Marcel Proust
Happiness serves hardly any other purpose than to make unhappiness possible.
Marcel Proust
In a separation it is the one who is not really in love who says the more tender things.
Marcel Proust
Let us leave pretty women to men devoid of imagination.
Marcel Proust
We become moral when we are unhappy.
Marcel Proust
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
All our final decisions are made in a state of mind that is not going to last.
Marcel Proust
Time passes, and little by little everything that we have spoken in falsehood becomes true.
Marcel Proust
Your soul is a dark forest. But the trees are of a particular species, they are genealogical trees.
Marcel Proust
Our intonations contain our philosophy of life, what each of us is constantly telling himself about things. (Marcel Proust)
Those whose suffering is due to love are, as we say of certain invalids, their own physicians.
Marcel Proust
No exile at the South Pole or on the summit of Mont Blanc separates us more effectively from others than the practice of a hidden vice.
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
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.
Marcel Proust
It is always during a passing state of mind that we make lasting resolutions.
Marcel Proust
Lies are essential to humanity. They are perhaps as important as the pursuit of pleasure and moreover are dictated by that pursuit.
Marcel Proust
Words do not change their meanings so drastically in the course of centuries as, in our minds, names do in the course of a year or two.
Marcel Proust
The world was not created once and for all time for each of us individually. There are added to it in the course of our life things of which we have never had any suspicion.
Marcel Proust
Habit is a second nature which prevents us from knowing the first, of which it has neither the cruelties nor the enchantments.
Marcel Proust
People can have many different kinds of pleasure. The real one is that for which they will forsake the others. (Marcel Proust)
If only for the sake of elegance, I try to remain morally pure.
Marcel Proust
It was not evil that gave her the idea of pleasure, that seemed to her attractive; it was pleasure, rather, that seemed evil.
Marcel Proust
From that instant I had not to take another step; the ground moved forward under my feet in that garden where, for so long, my actions had ceased to require any control, or even attention, from my will. Custom came to take me in her arms, carried me all the way up to my bed, and laid me down there like a little child.
Marcel Proust
We are not provided with wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can take for us, an effort which no one can spare us.
Marcel Proust