Top 100 Marcel Proust Quotes
#1. In most women's lives, everything, even the greatest sorrow, comes down to a question of 'I haven't got a thing to wear'.
Marcel Proust
#2. 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
#3. We must love men more than things, and I admire and weep more for the soldiers than for the churches which were only the recording of an heroic gesture which today is reenacted at every moment.
Marcel Proust
#4. Genius, having the widest experience of the human intelligence, can best understand the ideas most directly in opposition to those which form the foundation of its own works.
Marcel Proust
#5. It is always thus, impelled by a state of mind which is destined not to last, we make our irrevocable decisions
Marcel Proust
#6. There was nothing abnormal about it when homosexuality was the norm.
Marcel Proust
#7. Sometimes in the afternoon sky the moon would pass white as a cloud, furtive, lusterless, like an actress who does not have to perform yet and who, from the audience, in street clothes, watches the other actors for a moment, making herself inconspicuous, not wanting anyone to pay attention to her.
Marcel Proust
#8. The harm that Albertine had done me was a last bond between her and myself which outlived memory even, for with the conservation of energy which belongs to everything that is physical, suffering has no need of the lessons of memory.
Marcel Proust
#9. How paradoxical it is to search reality for the pictures that are stored in one's memory.
Marcel Proust
#10. At the heart of our friendly or purely social relations, there lurks a hostility momentarily cured but recurring by fits and starts.
Marcel Proust
#11. When he spoke, his words came with a confusion which was delightful to hear because one felt that it indicated not so much a defect in his speech as a quality of his soul, as it were a survival from the age of innocence which he had never wholly outgrown.
Marcel Proust
#12. A writer must not take offence when inverts give his heroines masculine faces.
Marcel Proust
#13. When one feels oneself smitten by love for a woman, one ought to say to oneself, "What are her surroundings? What has been her life? All one's future happiness lies in the answer.
Marcel Proust
#14. Her blue, almond-shaped eyes - now even more elongated - had altered in appearance; they were indeed of the same colour, but seemed to have passed into a liquid state. So much so that, when she closed them, it was as though a pair of curtains had been drawn to shut out a view of the sea.
Marcel Proust
#15. He [Bloch] was one of those touchy, highly-strung people who cannot bear to have made a blunder, will not admit it to themselves, and whose whole day is ruined by it.
Marcel Proust
#16. An innately sensitive man who has no imagination could, nevertheless write admirable novels.
Marcel Proust
#17. The social world being the realm of nullity, there exist between the merits of women in society only insignificant degrees,
Marcel Proust
#18. The interval of space separating her from him was one which he must as inevitably traverse as he must descend, by an irresistible gravitation, the steep slope of life itself.
Marcel Proust
#19. My dear," she had said to Mamma, "I could not bring myself to give the child anything that was not well written,
Marcel Proust
#20. We think and name in one world, we live and feel in another.
Marcel Proust
#21. Whenever she saw in others an advantage, however trivial, which she herself lacked, she would persuade herself that it was no advantage at all, but a drawback, and would pity so as not to have to envy them.
Marcel Proust
#22. 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
#23. Who cannot recall, as I can, the reading they did in the holidays, which one would conceal successively in all those hours of the day peaceful and inviolable enough to be able to afford it refuge?
Marcel Proust
#24. The true paradises are the paradises that we have lost.
Marcel Proust
#25. That which we remember of our conduct is ignored by our closest neighbour; but that which we have forgotten having said, or even what we never said, will cause laughter even into the next world.
Marcel Proust
#26. L'adolescence est le seul temps o u' l'on ait appris quelque chose. Adolescence is the only time when we can learn something.
Marcel Proust
#27. Lies are essential to humanity. They are perhaps as important as the pursuit of pleasure and moreover are dictated by that pursuit.
Marcel Proust
#28. But the harshness of his steely glare was compensated by the softness of his cotton gloves, so that, as he approached Swann, he seemed to be exhibiting at once an utter contempt for his person and the most tender regard for his hat.
Marcel Proust
#29. They say that Death embellishes its victims and exaggerates their virtues, but in general it is actually life that wronged them. Death, that pious and irreproachable witness, teaches us, in both truth and charity, that in each man there is usually more good than evil.
Marcel Proust
#30. I would be astonished to find myself in a state of darkness, pleasant and restful enough for the eyes, and even more, perhaps, for my mind, to which it appeared incomprehensible, without a cause, a matter dark indeed.
Marcel Proust
#31. That distant look characteristic of people who do not wish to be agreeable ...
Marcel Proust
#32. as a painter who can have his subject for short sittings only prepares his palette, and from what he remembers and from rough notes does in advance everything which he possibly can do in the sitter's absence.
Marcel Proust
#33. Our desires cut across one another, and in this confused existence it is rare for happiness to coincide with the desire that clamoured for it.
Marcel Proust
#34. It is to such sufferings that we attach the pleasure of loving, of delighting in the most insignificant remarks of a woman, which we know to be insignificant, but which we perfume with her scent.
Marcel Proust
#35. Three-quarters of the mental ingenuity and the mendacious boasting squandered ever since the world began by people who are only cheapened thereby, have been aimed at inferiors.
Marcel Proust
#36. Were it not for habit, life would seem delightful to beings constantly under threat of dying, in other words to all humankind.
Marcel Proust
#38. You cannot be surprised at anything men do, they're such brutes.
Marcel Proust
#39. Ah, in those earliest days of love how naturally the kisses spring into life! So closely, in their profusion, do they crowd together that lovers would find it as hard to count the kisses exchanged in an hour as to count the flowers in a meadow in May.
Marcel Proust
#40. We were resigned to suffering, thinking that we loved outside ourselves, and we perceive that our love is a function of our sorrow, that our love perhaps is our sorrow..
Marcel Proust
#41. Because he knew that for other people their own social obligations took precedence of the death of a
friend, and could put himself in her place by dint of his instinctive
politeness.
Marcel Proust
#42. For in order to really suffer at the hands of a woman one must have believed in her completely.
Marcel Proust
#43. She was capable of causing me pain, but no longer any joy. Pain alone kept my wearisome attachment alive.
Marcel Proust
#44. Presently, one after another, like shyly hopping sparrows, her friends arrived, black against the snow.
Marcel Proust
#45. She's got feet like boats, whiskers like an American, and her undies are filthy.
Marcel Proust
#46. We dream much of Paradise, or rather of a number of successive Paradises, but each of them is, long before we die, a Paradise lost, in which we should feel ourselves lost also.
Marcel Proust
#47. For we are not as faithful to the being we have most loved as we are to ourselves and sooner or later we forget her - since that is one of our characteristics - so as to start loving another.
Marcel Proust
#48. Women who are to some extent resistant, whom one cannot possess at once, whom one does not even know at first whether one will ever possess, are the only interesting ones.
Marcel Proust
#49. For theories and schools, like microbes and corpuscles, devour one another and by their strife ensure the continuity of life.
Marcel Proust
#50. And so when studying faces, we do indeed measure them, but as painters, not as surveyors.
Marcel Proust
#51. One felt that in her renunciation of life she had deliberately abandoned those places in which she might at least have been able to see the man she loved, for others where he had never trod.
Marcel Proust
#52. Nobility is often no more than the inner aspect which our egotistical feelings assume when we have not yet named and classified them.
Marcel Proust
#53. In a separation it is the one who is not really in love who says the more tender things.
Marcel Proust
#54. The wretchedness of ordinary life, endured so gaily when it is part of our normal existence, is made far worse when it comes as something new, and is exaggerated by the working of the imagination.
Marcel Proust
#55. M. de Charlus persisted in not replying. I thought I could see a smile flicker about his lips: the smile of the man who looks down from a great height on the characters and manners of lesser men.
Marcel Proust
#56. I loved her; I was sorry not to have had the time and the inspiration to insult her, to do her some injury, to force her to keep some memory of me.
Marcel Proust
#57. And each time the cowardice that deters us from every difficult task, every important enterprise, has urged me to leave the thing alone, to drink my tea and to think merely of the worries of today and my hopes for tomorrow, which can be brooded over painlessly.
Marcel Proust
#58. Why, when we regain consciousness, is it not an identity other than the one we had previously that is embodied in us? It is not clear what dictates the choice nor why, among the millions of human beings we might be, it is the being we were the day before that we unerringly grasp.
Marcel Proust
#59. Her face was plastered with layers of powder and looked like a face of stone. And with her noble profile, she seemed, on the triangular, moss-covered pedestal hidden by her cape, like a crumbling goddess in a park.
Marcel Proust
#60. Discovery consists not in seeking new lands, but in seeing with new eyes.
Marcel Proust
#61. Combray, we used often to invite him to our house.
Marcel Proust
#62. We passionately long that there may be another life in which we shall be similar to what we are here below. But we do not pause to reflect that, even without waiting for that other life, in this life, after a few years we are unfaithful to what we have been, to what we wished to remain immortally.
Marcel Proust
#63. Altogether, I had derived little benefit from being in Balbec, for which reason I was all the more determined to come back one day. I felt I had spent too short a time there.
Marcel Proust
#64. So difficult is it for us to know, with the dead as with the living, whether a thing would cause them joy or sorrow!
Marcel Proust
#65. One pretended not to know that the body of a hostess was at the disposal of all comers, provided that her visiting list showed no gaps.
Marcel Proust
#66. The time which we have at our disposal every day is elastic; the passions that we feel expand it, those that we inspire contract it; and habit fills up what remains.
Marcel Proust
#67. Later on, absence taught me far more bitter lessons: that you get accustomed to absence, that the greatest abatement of the self, the most humiliating torment is to feel that you are no longer tormented by absence.
Marcel Proust
#68. But the presence of Odette continued to sow in Swann's heart alternate seeds of love and suspicion.
Marcel Proust
#69. Hard people are weak people whom nobody wants, and the strong, caring little whether they are wanted or not, have alone that meekness which the common herd mistake for weakness.
Marcel Proust
#70. There are few who are worthy to understand what I feel. [...] I seek out those who are of this chosen few, and I avoid the rest.
Marcel Proust
#71. Perfume is that last and best reserve of the past, the one which when all out tears have run dry, can make us cry again!
Marcel Proust
#72. He lives at Balbec? crooned the Baron in a tone so far from interrogatory that it is regrettable that the written language does not possess a sign other than the question mark to end such apparently unquestioning remarks. It is true that such a sign would be of little use except to M. de Charlus.
Marcel Proust
#73. The tiny, initial clue ... by allowing us to imagine what we do not know, stimulates a desire for knowledge.
Marcel Proust
#74. Do you imagine that the poisonous spittle of five hundred little men of your sort, hoisted on to each other's shoulders, could even drool down on to the tips of my august toes?
Marcel Proust
#75. The creation of the world did not occur at the beginning of time, it occurs every day.
Marcel Proust
#76. The person with whom we are in love is to be recognised only by the intensity of the pain that we suffer.
Marcel Proust
#77. It is only with the passions of others that we are ever really familiar, and what we come to discover about our own can only be learned from them.
Marcel Proust
#78. And in myself, too, many things have perished which, I imagined, would last for ever, and new structures have arisen, giving birth to new sorrows and new joys which in those days I could not have foreseen, just as now the old are difficult of comprehension.
Marcel Proust
#79. This book of mine has not been manufactured: it has been garnered.
Marcel Proust
#80. But even with respect to the most insignificant things in life, none of us constitutes a material whole, identical for everyone, which a person has only to go look up as though we were a book of specifications or a last testament; our social personality is a creation of the minds of others.
Marcel Proust
#81. And if she had appeared, would I have dared to speak to her?
Marcel Proust
#82. Her initial need to confide in someone arose from the first disappointments of her sensuality, emerging as naturally as the first satisfactions of love normally emerge. She had not as yet known love. A short time later she suffered from it, which is the only manner in which we get to know it.
Marcel Proust
#83. Let a prize lower my position, if it causes me to be read; that I prefer immediately to all the honors.
Marcel Proust
#84. 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.
Marcel Proust
#85. There is nothing like desire for obstructing any resemblance between what one says and what one has on one's mind.
Marcel Proust
#86. Each one of us is not a single person, but contains many persons who have not all the same moral value
Marcel Proust
#87. The sea refreshes our imagination because it does not make us think of human life; yet it rejoices the soul, because, like the soul, it is an infinite and impotent striving, a strength that is ceaselessly broken by falls, an eternal and exquisite lament.
Marcel Proust
#88. Her eyes seemed to promise a spirit forever capsized in the diseased waters of regret.
Marcel Proust
#89. His life and family circle changed considerably between 1900 and 1905. In February 1903, Proust's brother Robert married and left the family apartment. His father died in September of the same year. Finally, and most crushingly, Proust's beloved mother died in September 1905.
Marcel Proust
#90. Love is an incurable malady like those pathetic states in which rheumatism affords the sufferer a brief respite only to be replaced by epileptiform headaches.
Marcel Proust
#92. 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.
Marcel Proust
#93. 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
#94. For in this respect love is not like war; after the battle is ended we renew the fight with keener ardour, which we never cease to intensify the more thoroughly we are defeated, provided always that we are still in a position to give battle.
Marcel Proust
#95. The loss of a sense adds as much beauty to the world as its acquisition.
Marcel Proust
#96. The humanist, who read too much, ate too much. He quoted and burped, and these two complaints were equally repugnant to his neighbor, a self-made aristocrat, Madame Lenoir.
Marcel Proust
#97. Do you suppose that it is within your power to insult me? You evidently are not aware to whom you are speaking? Do you imagine that the envenomed spittle of five hundred little gentlemen of your type, heaped one upon another, would succeed in slobbering so much as the tips of my august toes?
Marcel Proust
#98. The universe is true for us all and dissimilar to each of us.
Marcel Proust
#99. The time at our disposal each day is elastic; the passions we feel dilate it, those that inspire us shrink it, and habit fills it.
Marcel Proust
#100. Most of the supposed expressions of our feelings merely relieve us of them by drawing them out of us in an indistinct form that does not teach us to know them.
Marcel Proust
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