Quotes By Marcel Proust

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.

A change in the weather is sufficient to recreate the world and ourselves.

What a profound significance small things assume when the woman we love conceals them from us.

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.

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.

Let us leave pretty women to men devoid of imagination.

Like many intellectuals, he was incapable of saying a simple thing in a simple way.

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

There is no man, however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived in a way the consciousness of which is so unpleasant to him in later life that he would gladly, if he could, expunge it from his memory.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.