Top 100 Marcel Proust Quotes
#1. To me, the idea of living this lifestyle is so boring that I would prefer to read Marcel Proust the whole time during a tour.
Laurent Brancowitz
#2. my most desperate moments, I have never conceived of anything more horrible than a law office." -Marcel Proust
Petula Parker
#3. The true voyage of self-discovery lies not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes. - MARCEL PROUST
Kristin Hannah
#4. If there was ever a bigger pansy than my father, it was Marcel Proust.
Alison Bechdel
#5. His work kept on living, like the watches on the wrists of dead soldiers. [Said of Marcel Proust]
Jean Cocteau
#6. Marcel Proust shut out visitors from his cork-lined room, where he wrote, but he probably expected to be immortalized in the literary canon. Even the most introverted drives and motives are set in a social context and amplified by the potential for achieving fame.
Tyler Cowen
#7. The only real voyage consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes; in seeing the universe through the eyes of another, one hundred others-in seeing the hundred universes that each of them sees.
Marcel Proust, translated by Kiyotesong
Rob Brezsny
#8. A large, still book is a piece of quietness, succulent and nourishing in a noisy world, which I approach and imbibe with "a sort of greedy enjoyment," as Marcel Proust said of those rooms of his old home whose air was "saturated with the bouquet of silence."
Holbrook Jackson
#9. It is seldom indeed that one parts on good terms, because if one were on good terms one would not part. - MARCEL PROUST
Jon Acuff
#10. You're our Marcel Proust, Mr. Zuckerman.
Zuckerman laughed. It wasn't exactly how he saw it.
Philip Roth
#11. Because the erotic frisson is such that the kiss that you only imagine giving,can be as powerful and as enchanting as hours of actual lovemaking. As Marcel Proust said, it's our imagination that is responsible for love, not the other person.
Esther Perel
#12. Many of the most accomplished people of our era were considered by experts to have no future. Jackson Pollock, Marcel Proust, Elvis Presley, Ray Charles, Lucille Ball, and Charles Darwin were all thought to have little potential for their chosen fields.
Carol S. Dweck
#13. SAYING AND CONCEALING For I would prefer to have these attacks and please you, rather than displease you and not have them. - Marcel Proust in a letter to his mother
Alice Miller
#14. Truth and life are very difficult to fathom, and I retained of them, without really having got to know them, an impression in which sadness was perhaps actually eclipsed by exhaustion.
Marcel Proust
#15. Like a blood-red sky that warns the passerby, "There is a fire over there," certain blazing looks often reveal passions that they serve merely to reflect. They are flames in the mirror.
Marcel Proust
#16. 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
#18. 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
#19. Then the concerts came to an end, the weather turned bad and my girls left Balbec, not all at once, as the swallows leave, but within the same week.
Marcel Proust
#20. For every death is a simplification of existence for the others, removes the necessity to show gratitude, the obligation to pay visits.
Marcel Proust
#21. The hope of being relieved gives him the courage to suffer.
Marcel Proust
#22. Masterpieces are no more than the shipwrecked flotsam of great minds.
Marcel Proust
#23. If the theater is the refuge of the conversationalist whose friend is mute and whose mistress is insipid, then conversation, even the most exquisite, is the pleasure of men without imagination.
Marcel Proust
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. That form of the instinct of self-preservation with which we guard everything that is best in ourselves ...
Marcel Proust
#28. Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and composed our masterpieces.
Marcel Proust
#29. Yes, I have been forced to whittle down the facts, and to be a liar, but it is not one universe, there are millions, almost as many as the number of human eyes and brains in existence, that awake every morning.
Marcel Proust
#30. It is always thus, impelled by a state of mind which is destined not to last, we make our irrevocable decisions
Marcel Proust
#31. That melancholy which we feel when we cease to obey orders which, from one day to another, keep the future hidden, and realise that we have at last begun to live in real earnest, as a grown-up person, the life, the only life that any of us has at his disposal.
Marcel Proust
#32. As though on a seedling whose blossoms ripen at different times, I had seen in old ladies, on that beach at Balbec, the dried-up seeds and sagging tubers that my girl-friends would become. But, now that it was time for buds to blossom, what did that matter?
Marcel Proust
#33. As a man with imagination you can enjoy only in regret or in anticipation - that is, in the past or in the future.
Marcel Proust
#34. there are things in our souls which we know not how much they mean to us. Or rather, if we live without them, it is because, either through fear of failing or suffering, we daily postpone the moment of coming under their thrall.
Marcel Proust
#35. Like many intellectuals, he was incapable of saying a simple thing in a simple way
Marcel Proust
#36. There was nothing abnormal about it when homosexuality was the norm.
Marcel Proust
#37. 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
#38. Happiness is good for the body, but it is grief which develops the strengths of the mind.
Marcel Proust
#39. 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
#40. We are all of us obliged, if we are to make reality endurable, to nurse a few little follies in ourselves.
Marcel Proust
#41. What had to move - a leaf of the chestnut tree, for instance - moved.
Marcel Proust
#42. How paradoxical it is to search reality for the pictures that are stored in one's memory.
Marcel Proust
#43. For, just as in the beginning it is formed by desire, so afterwards love is kept in existence only by painful anxiety.
Marcel Proust
#44. At the heart of our friendly or purely social relations, there lurks a hostility momentarily cured but recurring by fits and starts.
Marcel Proust
#45. We are at times too ready to believe that the present is the only possible state of things.
Marcel Proust
#46. There's nothing like desire to prevent the things one says from having any resemblance to the things in one's mind.
Marcel Proust
#47. What we have not had to decipher, to elucidate by our own efforts, what was clear before we looked at it, is not ours. From ourselves comes only that which we drag forth from the obscurity which lies within us, that which to others is unknown.
Marcel Proust
#48. Because happiness alone is good for the body; whereas sorrow develops the strength of the mind.
Marcel Proust
#49. The idea that 'Life' contains situations more interesting and more romantic than all the romances ever written.
Marcel Proust
#50. Like a fruit hidden among its leaves, which has grown and ripened unobserved by man, until it falls of its own accord, there came upon us one night the kitchen-maid's confinement.
Marcel Proust
#51. 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
#52. You can't learn the truth about a man's intentions by asking him.
Marcel Proust
#53. The inertia of the mind urges it to slide down the easy slope of imagination, rather than to climb the steep slope of introspection.
Marcel Proust
#54. Reading is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.
Marcel Proust
#55. How much farther does anguish penetrate in psychology than psychology itself!
Marcel Proust
#56. Habit! that skillful but slow arranger, which starts out by letting our spirit suffer for weeks in a temporary state, but that thespirit is after all happy to discover, for without habit and reduced to its own resources, the spirit would be unable to make any lodgings seem habitable.
Marcel Proust
#57. People are not always very tolerant of the tears which they themselves have provoked.
Marcel Proust
#58. A language which we do not know is a fortress sealed.
Marcel Proust
#59. But in exchange for what our imagination leads us to expect and we give ourselves so much futile trouble trying to find, life gives us something which we were very far from imagining.
Marcel Proust
#60. Death is in truth an illness from which we recover
Marcel Proust
#61. We may talk for a lifetime without doing more than indefinitely repeat the vacuity of a minute.
Marcel Proust
#62. The satisfaction an imbecile derives from having right on his side and being certain of success is especially irritating.
Marcel Proust
#63. A writer must not take offence when inverts give his heroines masculine faces.
Marcel Proust
#64. Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.
Marcel Proust
#65. A doctor who doesn't say too many foolish things is a patient half-cured.
Marcel Proust
#66. 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
#67. I did not distinguish the successive theories of which that uncertainty was composed any more than, when we watch a horse running, we isolate the successive positions of its body as they appear upon a bioscope. But
Marcel Proust
#68. Life is strewn with these miracles for which people who love can always hope.
Marcel Proust
#69. The oddities of charming people exasperate us, but there are few if any charming people who are not, at the same time, odd.
Marcel Proust
#70. The illusions of paternal love are perhaps no less poignant than those of the other kind; many daughters regard their fathers merely as the old men who leave their fortunes to them.
Marcel Proust
#71. A woman whom we need and who makes us suffer elicits from us a whole gamut of feelings far more profound and vital than a man of genius who interests us.
Marcel Proust
#72. Creating is living doubly. The groping, anxious quest of a Proust, his meticulous collecting of flowers, of wallpapers, and of anxieties, signifies nothing else.
Albert Camus
#73. So few are the easy victories as the ultimate failures.
Marcel Proust
#75. I experienced, suddenly, that special pleasure, which bore no resemblance to any other ...
Marcel Proust
#76. Aristocracy is a relative thing. And there are plenty of out-of-the-way places where the son of an upholsterer is the arbiter of fashion and reigns over a court like any young Prince of Wales.
Marcel Proust
#77. When I am not too sad to listen, music is my consolation.
Marcel Proust
#78. Our vanity, our passions, our spirit of imitation, our abstract intelligence, our habits have long been at work, and it is the task of art to undo this work of theirs, making us travel back in the direction from which we have come to the depths where what has really existed lies unknown within us.
Marcel Proust
#79. A picture's beauty does not depend on the things portrayed in it.
Marcel Proust
#80. Reality is never more than a first step towards an unknown on the road to which one can never progress very far.
Marcel Proust
#81. For in this worldof ours where everything withers, everything perishes, there is a thing that decays, that crumbles into dust even more completely, leaving behind, still fewer traces of itself, than beauty: namely, grief.
Marcel Proust
#82. Dear Friend: I have nearly died three times since morning.
Marcel Proust
#83. I longed for nothing more than to behold a stormy sea, less as a mighty spectacle than as a momentary revelation of the true life of nature;
Marcel Proust
#84. To determine not to think of it was but to think of it still, to suffer from it still.
Marcel Proust
#85. But it is always easy to put together stories about a past which nobody any longer remembers, like those about journeys to countries where nobody has ever been.
Marcel Proust
#86. 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
#87. When nothing else subsists from the past, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered ... the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls ... bearing resiliently, on tiny and almost impalpable drops of their essence, the immense edifice of memory
Marcel Proust
#88. All the mind's activity is easy if it is not subjected to reality.
Marcel Proust
#89. To think that I have wasted years of my life, that I have longed for death, that the greatest love that I have ever known has been for a woman who did not please me, who was not in my style! PLACE-NAMES:
Marcel Proust
#90. I drank a second mouthful in which I find nothing more than in the first, then a third which gives me rather less than the second. It is time to stop; the potion is losing its magic.
Marcel Proust
#91. As with the future, it is not all at once but grain by grain that one savours the past.
Marcel Proust
#92. She was not yet dead. But I was already alone.
Marcel Proust
#93. 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
#94. The only true voyage of discovery, the only fountain of Eternal Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another.
Marcel Proust
#96. We only really know what is new, what suddenly introduces to our sensibility a change of tone which strikes us, that for which habit has not yet substituted its pale fac-similes.
Marcel Proust
#97. We fall in love for a smile, a look, a shoulder. That is enough; then, in the long hours of hope or sorrow, we fabricate a person, we compose a character.
Marcel Proust
#98. 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
#99. They locked gazes, showing their souls on the edge of their pupils, their melancholy and passionate souls, which death was unable to unite.
Marcel Proust
#100. Always try to keep a patch of sky above your life.
Marcel Proust
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