Quotes By Marcel Proust

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

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

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.

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.

Love is a reciprocal torture.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Lies are essential to humanity. They are perhaps as important as the pursuit of pleasure and moreover are dictated by that pursuit.

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

If only for the sake of elegance, I try to remain morally pure.

There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book.

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.

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

Love is space and time measured by the heart.

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.

Your soul is a dark forest. But the trees are of a particular species, they are genealogical trees.

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

Our intonations contain our philosophy of life, what each of us is constantly telling himself about things.

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

A powerful idea communicates some of its strength to him who challenges it.

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.

People can have many different kinds of pleasure. The real one is that for which they will forsake the others.

Those whose suffering is due to love are, as we say of certain invalids, their own physicians.

We become moral when we are unhappy.

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.

Habit is a second nature which prevents us from knowing the first, of which it has neither the cruelties nor the enchantments.