Quotes By Marcel Proust

We become moral when we are unhappy.

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.

Like everybody who is not in love, he thought one chose the person to be loved after endless deliberations and on the basis of particular qualities or advantages.

Three-quarters of the sicknesses of intelligent people come from their intelligence. They need at least a doctor who can understand this sickness.

Only through art can we emerge from ourselves and know what another person sees.

It is always during a passing state of mind that we make lasting resolutions.

The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.

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

If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time.

Time passes, and little by little everything that we have spoken in falsehood becomes true.

In a separation it is the one who is not really in love who says the more tender things.

Happiness serves hardly any other purpose than to make unhappiness possible.

Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and composed our masterpieces.

We do not succeed in changing things according to our desire, but gradually our desire changes.

Time, which changes people, does not alter the image we have retained of them.

People wish to learn to swim and at the same time to keep one foot on the ground.

The bonds that unite another person to our self exist only in our mind.

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.

Illness is the doctor to whom we pay most heed; to kindness, to knowledge, we make promise only; pain we obey.

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.

All our final decisions are made in a state of mind that is not going to last.

The charms of the passing woman are generally in direct proportion to the swiftness of her passing.

The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.

The only paradise is paradise lost.

We must never be afraid to go too far, for truth lies beyond.

We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.

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.

Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.

It is in moments of illness that we are compelled to recognize that we live not alone but chained to a creature of a different kingdom, whole worlds apart, who has no knowledge of us and by whom it is impossible to make ourselves understood: our body.

We are healed from suffering only by experiencing it to the full.