Marcel Proust Quotes

I came to recognise that, apart from her [Françoise's] own kinsfolk, the sufferings of humanity insp...

A 'real' person, profoundly as we may sympathise with him, is in a great measure perceptible only th...

... the courage of one's opinions is always a form of calculating cowardice in the eyes of the 'othe...

... there was no need for him to hasten towards the attainment of a happiness already captured and h...

Or she would look at him with a sullen expression, once again he would see before him a face worthy ...

And in myself, too, many things have perished which, I imagined, would last for ever, and new struct...

But since the facts which I should then have recalled would have been prompted only by an exercise o...

that profit which good things bestowed on us by teaching to seek pleasure elsewhere than in the barr...

And the others too were beginning to remark in Swann that abnormal, excessive, shameful and deserved...

The flowers which played then among the grass, the water which rippled past in the sunshine, the who...

He suffered greatly from being shut up among all these people whose stupidity and absurdities wounde...

... the kiss, the bodily surrender which would seem natural and but moderately attractive...

... I experienced, suddenly, that special pleasure, which bore no resemblance to any other...

In Swann's mind, however, these words, meeting no opposition, settled and hardened until they assume...

Unkindness is inspired by hatred, anger fuels it into action in which there is no great joy; it woul...

... seeking to indicate to her by the extent of his gratitude the corresponding intensity of the ple...

Sadists of Mlle Vinteuil's sort are creatures so purely sentimental, so naturally virtuous, that eve...

Among all the modes by which love is brought into being, among all the agents which disseminate that...

Will it ultimately reach the clear surface of my consciousness, this memory, this old, dead moment w...

Then his jealousy rejoiced at the discovery, as though that jealousy had had an independent existenc...

An excellent but an eccentric man in whom the least little thing would, it seemed, often check the f...

Swann could at once detect in this story one of those fragments of literal truth which liars, when t...

He had so long since ceased to direct his life toward any ideal goal, and had confined himself to th...

She was capable of causing me pain, but no longer any joy. Pain alone kept my wearisome attachment a...

People are not always very tolerant of the tears which they themselves have provoked.

So what I had believed to be nothing to me was simply my entire life. How ignorant one is of oneself...

Gardeners produce flowers that are delicious dreams, and others too that are like nightmares.

I spent many a charming evening talking and playing with Albertine, but none so sweet as when I was ...

We would like the truth to be revealed to us by novel signs, not by a sentence, a sentence similar t...

But I consoled myself with the reflexion that in spite of everything she was for me the real point o...

Memory, instead of being a duplicate, always present before one's eyes, of the various events of one...

It is not because other people are dead that our affection for them grows faint, it is because we ou...

I walked past her, thinking: Is this what happens to the youth of women? Those whom we have met in t...

...the mode by which he "heard" the universe and projected it far beyond himself. Perhaps it was in ...

Every woman feels that the greater her power over a man, the more impossible it is to leave him exce...

I was so much in the habit of having Albertine with me, and now I suddenly saw a new aspect of Habit...

Lies, so often misleading and which form the substance of all conversations, are less effective in c...

One wants to be understood because one wants to be loved, and one wants to be loved because one love...

I could no longer desire physically without feeling a need for her, without suffering from her absen...

As soon as jealousy is discovered, it is regarded by the person who is its object as a challenge whi...

The habit of thinking prevents us at times from experiencing reality, immunises us against it, makes...

We consider it innocent to desire, and heinous that the other person should do so.

So difficult is it for us to know, with the dead as with the living, whether a thing would cause the...

Lying is essential to humanity. It plays as large a part perhaps as the quest for pleasure, and is m...

A person has no need of sincerity, nor even of skill in lying, in order to be loved. Here I mean by ...

It is a mistake to speak of a bad choice in love, since as soon as there is a choice it can only be ...

When we have passed a certain age, the soul of the child that we were and the souls of the dead from...

Let us leave pretty women to men with no imagination.

As with the future, it is not all at once but grain by grain that one savours the past.

The creation of the world did not occur at the beginning of time, it occurs every day.

Love is space and time made perceptible to the heart.

Let an illness, a duel, a runaway horse make us see death face to face, and how richly we should hav...

I must choose to cease from suffering or to cease from loving.

One morning indeed, I felt a sudden misgiving that she not only had left the house but had gone for ...

From the pavement, I could see the window of Albertine’s room, that window, formerly quite black, at...

The sea refreshes our imagination because it does not make us think of human life; yet it rejoices t...

Occasionally I looked up towards some vast old apartment with its shutters still open and where amph...

We forgive the crimes of individuals, but not their participation in a collective crime.

...we need to bear in mind that our opinion of other people, our ties with friends or family, have o...

She [Mme Sazerat] did not offer her hand, but smiled at my mother with vague melancholy as one smile...

Dinner-parties bore us because our imagination is absent, and reading interests us because it is kee...

It is illness that makes us recognize that we do not live in isolation but are chained to a being fr...

Why, when we regain consciousness, is it not an identity other than the one we had previously that i...

She was not yet dead. But I was already alone.

We may, indeed, say that the hour of death is uncertain, but when we say so we represent that hour t...

Quite half of the human race was in tears.

Once he has outgrown his youth, a man will rarely remain a prisoner to his insolence. He had thought...

Certainly, it is more reasonable to devote one's life to women than to postage stamps, old snuff-box...

For her [Françoise], wealth was like a necessary condition without which virtue would lack both meri...

Only imagination and belief can differentiate from the rest certain objects, certain people, and can...

He [Bloch] was one of those touchy, highly-strung people who cannot bear to have made a blunder, wil...

The impression given us by a person or a work (or an interpretation of a work) of marked individuali...

The Princess of Parma was a Courvoisier in that she was incapable of innovation in social matters, b...

There is nothing like desire for obstructing any resemblance between what one says and what one has ...

Her mind, shaped so long before my own, was for me the equivalent of what had been offered me by the...

Poets claim that we recapture for a moment the self that we were long ago when we enter some house o...

Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself. The writer's work is only a kind of op...

What we have not had to decipher, to elucidate by our own efforts, what was clear before we looked a...

...pretention is very close to stupidity and that simplicity has a less visible but still gratifying...

And like an aviator who rolls painfully along the ground until, abruptly, he breaks away from it, I ...

But sometimes it is just when everything seems to be lost that we experience a presentiment that may...

It was that evening, when my mother abdicated her authority, that marked the beginning, along with t...

No doubt my books too, like my mortal being, would eventually die, one day. But one has to resign on...

Real life, life finally uncovered and clarified, the only life in consequence lived to the full, is ...

Our vanity, our passions, our spirit of imitation, our abstract intelligence, our habits have long b...

Ideas are substitutes for sorrows...

… it would even be inexact to say that I thought of those who read it as readers of my book. Because...

The beauty of images lies behind things, the beauty of ideas in front of them.

But it is always easy to put together stories about a past which nobody any longer remembers, like t...

Every individual who makes us suffer can be attached by us to a divinity of which he or she is a mer...

Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself.

Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it p...

A book is like a large cemetery upon whose tombs one can no longer read the effaced names. On the ot...

A general is like a writer who wants to write a play, or a book, but whom the book itself, with the ...

The real propaganda is what—if we are genuinely a living member of a nation—we tell ourselves becaus...

For every death is a simplification of existence for the others, removes the necessity to show grati...

In the case of the solitary, his seclusion, even when it is absolute and ends only with life itself,...

Had I been less firmly resolved upon settling down definitively to work, I should perhaps have made ...

We imagine always when we speak that it is our own ears, our own mind, that are listening. The truth...

But genius, and even great talent, springs less from seeds of intellect and social refinement superi...

That our words are, as a general rule, filled by the people to whom we address them with a meaning w...