Marcel Proust quotes - page 4

A woman is of greater service to our life if she is in it, instead of being an element of happiness, an instrument of sorrow, and there is not a woman in the world the possession of whom is as precious as that of the truths which she reveals to us by causing us to suffer. (Marcel Proust)
In this way, the mansions arranged along either bank of the canal made one think of objects of nature, but of a nature which seemed to have created its works with a human imagination. View quote
Marcel Proust
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. View quote
Marcel Proust
In theory one is aware that the earth revolves, but in practice one does not perceive it, the ground upon which one treads seems not to move, and one can live undisturbed. So it is with Time in one's life. View quote
Marcel Proust
The charms of the passing woman are generally in direct proportion to the swiftness of her passing. View quote
Marcel Proust
A fashionable milieu is one in which everybody's opinion is made up of the opinion of all the others. Has everybody a different opinion? Then it is a literary milieu. View quote
Marcel Proust
A powerful idea communicates some of its power to the man who contradicts it. View quote
Marcel Proust
Desire makes everything blossom; possession makes everything wither and fade. View quote
Marcel Proust
What barrier is so insurmountable as silence? View quote
Marcel Proust
If we are to make reality endurable, we must all nourish a fantasy or two. View quote
Marcel Proust
We feel in one world, we think and name in another. Between the two we can set up a system of references, but we cannot fill in the gap. (Marcel Proust)
A man is not more entitled to be "received in good society," or at least to wish to be, because he is more intelligent and cultivated. This is one of those sophisms that the vanity of intelligent people picks up in the arsenal of their intelligence to justify their basest inclinations. View quote
Marcel Proust
Very simply, diverse personalities are to be found in the breast of each of us, and often the life of more than one superior man is nothing but the coexistence of a philosopher and a snob. View quote
Marcel Proust
By art alone we are able to get outside ourselves, to know what another sees of this universe which for him is not ours, the landscapes of which would remain as unknown to us as those of the moon. View quote
Marcel Proust
Love is a reciprocal torture. View quote
Marcel Proust
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. View quote
Marcel Proust
Love is a striking example of how little reality means to us. View quote
Marcel Proust
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. View quote
Marcel Proust
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. View quote
Marcel Proust
No man is a complete mystery except to himself. View quote
Marcel Proust
But sometimes illumination comes to our rescue at the very moment when all seems lost; we have knocked at every door and they open on nothing until, at last, we stumble unconsciously against the only one through which we can enter the kingdom we have sought in vain a hundred years - and it opens. (Marcel Proust)
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. View quote
Marcel Proust
The bonds that unite us to another human being are sanctified when he or she adopts the same point of view as ourselves in judging one of our imperfections. View quote
Marcel Proust
Things don't change, but by and by our wishes change. View quote
Marcel Proust
I wished to see storms only on those coasts where they raged with most violence... View quote
Marcel Proust