Marcel Proust Quotations

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

Love is space and time measured by the heart.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

We do not succeed in changing things according to our desire, but gradually our desire changes. The situation that we hoped to change because it was intolerable becomes unimportant. We have not managed to surmount the obstacle, as we were absolutely determined to do, but life has taken us round it, led us past it, and then if we turn round to gaze at the remote past, we can barely catch sight of it, so imperceptible has it become.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 time at our disposal each day is elastic; the passions we feel dilate it, those that inspire us shrink it, and habit fills it.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Let us leave pretty women to men devoid of imagination.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

The regularity of a habit is generally in proportion to its absurdity.

We always end up doing the thing we are second best at.

It is always thus, impelled by a state of mind which is destined not to last, that we make our irrevocable decisions

We are healed of a suffering only by expressing it to the full.

We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it in full.

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

There can be no piece of mind in love, since the advantage one has secured is never anything but a fresh starting-point for future desires

As soon as one is unhappy one becomes moral

The time which we have at our disposal every day is elastic; the passions we feel expand it, those that we inspire contract it, and habit fills up what remains

The stellar universe is not so difficult of comprehension as the real actions of other people.

A powerful idea communicates some of its power to the man who contradicts it

It is seldom indeed that one parts on good terms, because if one were on good terms, one would not part

Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value-judgments. An artist recreates those aspects of reality which represent his fundamental view of man's nature.

The features of our face are hardly more than gestures which have become permanent

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

It has been said that beauty brings a promise of happiness, but it could be otherwise that the possibility of joy is the beginning of beauty.

His hatred of snobs was a derivative of his snobbishness, but made the simpletons (in other words, everyone) believe that he was immune from snobbishness

Habit! that skillful but slow arranger, which starts out by letting our spirit suffer for weeks in a temporary state, but that thespirit is after all happy to discover, for without habit and reduced to its own resources, the spirit would be unable to make any lodgings seem habitable.

The sensitiveness claimed by neurotic is matched by their egotism: they cannot abide the flaunting by others of the sufferings to which they pay an even increasing amount of attention in themselves.

Wars are fought for the benefit of oligarchs, triumphs bought with the blood of peons.

It is up to my spirit to find the truth. But how? Grave uncertainty, each time the spirit feels beyond its own comprehension; whenit, the explorer, is altogether to obscure land that it must search and where all its baggage is of no use. To search? That is not all: to create.

No days, perhaps, of all our childhood are ever so fully lived as those that we had regarded as not being lived at all: days spent wholly with a favourite book. Everything that seemed to fill them full for others we pushed aside, because it stood between us and the pleasures of the Gods.

The features of our face are hardly more than gestures which force of habit made permanent. Nature, like the destruction of Pompeii, like the metamorphosis of a nymph into a tree, has arrested us in an accustomed movement.

We feel in one world, we think and name in another. Between the two we can set up a system of references, but we cannot fill in the gap.

The opinions which we hold of one another, our relations with friends and kinsfolk are in no sense permanent, save in appearance, but are as eternally fluid as the sea itself.

A person does not...stand motionless and clear before our eyes with his merits, his defects, his plans, his intentions with regard to ourself exposed on his surface...but is a shadow which we can never succeed in penetrating...a shadow behind which we can alternately imagine, with equal justification, that there burns the flame of hatred and of love.

The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it....

The most familiar precepts are not always the truest.

A doctor who doesn't say too many foolish things is a patient half-cured.

Neurosis has an absolute genius for malingering. There is no illness which it cannot counterfeit perfectly. If it is capable of deceiving the doctor, how should it fail to deceive the patient

People don't know when they are happy. They're never so unhappy as they think they are.

It is desire that engenders belief; if we fail as a rule to take this into account, it is because most of the desires that create beliefs end only with out own life.

Desire makes everything blossom

The stellar universe is not so difficult to understand as the real actions of other people, especially of the people with whom we are in love.

We were resigned to suffering, thinking that we loved outside ourselves, and we perceive that our love is a function of our sorrow, that our love perhaps is our sorrow..

As soon as he ceased to be mad he became merely stupid. There are maladies we must not seek to cure because they alone protect us from others that are more serious.

A certain similarity exists, although the type evolves, between all the women we love, a similarity that is due to the fixity of our own temperament, which it is that chooses them, eliminating all those who would not be at once our opposite and our complement, fitted that is to say to gratify our senses and to wring our heart.

Each reader reads only what is already within himself. The book is only a sort of optical instrument which the writer offers to the reader to enable the latter to discover in himself what he would not have found but for the aid of the book.

A man of letters, merely by reading a phrase, can estimate exactly the literary merit of its author.

There can be no peace of mind in love, since the advantage one has secured is never anything but a fresh starting-point for future desires.

The loss of a sense adds as much beauty to the world as its acquisition.

Indeed, among the lesser auxiliaries to success in love, an absence, the declining of an invitation to dinner, an unintentional, unconscious harshness are of more service than all the cosmetics and fine clothes in the world.

I drank a second mouthful in which I find nothing more than in the first, then a third which gives me rather less than the second. It is time to stop; the potion is losing its magic.

Medicine being a compendium of the successive and contradictory mistakes of medical practitioners, when we summon the wisest of them to our aid, the chances are that we may be relying on a scientific truth the error of which will be recognized in a few years time.

I understood that all the material of a literary work was in my past life, I understood that I had acquired it in the midst of frivolous amusements, in idleness, in tenderness and in pain, stored up by me without my divining its destination or even its survival, as the seed has in reserve all the ingredients which will nourish the plant.

Memory nourishes the heart, and grief abates.

Which of course is followed by: For those who have Awareness, a hint is quite enough. For the multitudes of heedless mere knowledge is useless. Haji Bektash Veli We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.

The one thing more difficult than following a regimen is not imposing it on others.

Everybody calls "clear" those ideas which have the same degree of confusion as his own.