Quotes By Marcel Proust

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

As long as men are free to ask what they must, free to say what they think, free to think what they will, freedom can never be lost and science can never regress.

Let us be grateful to people who make us happy, they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.

A woman one loves rarely suffices for all our needs, so we deceive her with another whom we do not love.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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