MARCEL PROUST QUOTES
French novelist (1871-1922)
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The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.
MARCEL PROUST, "The Captive," Remembrance of Things Past
The particulars of life do not matter to the artist; they merely provide him with the opportunity to lay bare his genius.
MARCEL PROUST, Within a Budding Grove
Habit! that skilful but slow-moving arranger who begins by letting our minds suffer for weeks on end in temporary quarters, but whom our minds are none the less only too happy to discover at last, for without it, reduced to their own devices, they would be powerless to make any room seem habitable.
MARCEL PROUST, Swann's Way
For each illness that doctors cure with medicine, they provoke ten in healthy people by inoculating them with the virus that is a thousand times more powerful than any microbe: the idea that one is ill.
MARCEL PROUST, "The Guermantes Way," Remembrance of Things Past
The reason why a work of genius is not easily admired from the first is that the man who has created it is extraordinary, that few other men resemble him. It is his work itself that, by fertilising the rare minds capable of understanding it, will make them increase and multiply.
MARCEL PROUST, Within a Budding Grove
Error, by force of contrast, enhances the triumph of Truth.
MARCEL PROUST, Swann's Way
A language which we do not know is a fortress sealed.
MARCEL PROUST, Within a Budding Grove
The loss of sense adds as much beauty to the world as its acquisition.
MARCEL PROUST, The Guermantes Way
We do not succeed in changing things according to our desire, but gradually our desire changes.
MARCEL PROUST, Remembrance of Things Past
Desire makes everything blossom; possession makes everything wither and fade.
MARCEL PROUST, Les Plaisirs et les Jours
Like a kaleidoscope which is every now and then given a turn, society arranges successively in different orders elements which one would have supposed immutable, and composes a new pattern.
MARCEL PROUST, Within a Budding Grove
The truth is that men can have several sorts of pleasure. The true pleasure is the one for which they abandon the other.
MARCEL PROUST, Sodom and Gomorrah
Are not the thoughts of the dying often turned towards the practical, painful, obscure, visceral aspect, towards the "seamy side" of death which is, as it happens, the side that death actually presents to them and forces them to feel, and which far more closely resembles a crushing burden, a difficulty in breathing, a destroying thirst, than the abstract idea to which we are accustomed to give the name of Death?
MARCEL PROUST, Swann's Way
There comes in all our lives a time ... when the ears can listen to no music save what the moonlight breathes through the flute of silence.
MARCEL PROUST, Swann's Way
Existence is of little interest save on days when the dust of realities is mingled with magic sand.
MARCEL PROUST, Within a Budding Grove
When a man is asleep, he has in a circle round him the chain of the hours, the sequence of the years, the order of the heavenly host. Instinctively, when he awakes, he looks to these, and in an instant reads off his own position on the earth's surface and the time that has elapsed during his slumbers; but this ordered procession is apt to grow confused, and to break its ranks.
MARCEL PROUST, Swann's Way
Certain favourite roles are played by us so often before the public and rehearsed so carefully when we are alone that we find it easier to refer to their fictitious testimony than to that of a reality which we have almost entirely forgotten.
MARCEL PROUST, Within a Budding Grove
We ought at least, from prudence, never to speak of ourselves, because that is a subject on which we may be sure that other people's views are never in accordance with our own.
MARCEL PROUST, Within a Budding Grove
It is only with the passions of others that we are ever really familiar, and what we come to discover about our own can only be learned from them.
MARCEL PROUST, Swann's Way
Our words are, as a general rule, filled by the people to whom we address them with a meaning which those people derive from their own substance, a meaning widely different from that which we had put into the same words when we uttered them.
MARCEL PROUST, Within a Budding Grove
Ah, in those earliest days of love how naturally the kisses spring into life! So closely, in their profusion, do they crowd together that lovers would find it as hard to count the kisses exchanged in an hour as to count the flowers in a meadow in May.
MARCEL PROUST, Swann's Way
If there is one thing more difficult than submitting oneself to a regime it is refraining from imposing it on other people.
MARCEL PROUST, Sodom and Gomorrah
A powerful idea communicates some of its power to the man who contradicts it. Partaking of the universal community of minds, it infiltrates, grafts itself on to, the mind of him who it refutes, among other contiguous ideas, with the aid of which, counter-attacking, he complements and corrects it; so that the final verdict is always to some extent the work of both parties to a discussion.
MARCEL PROUST, Within a Budding Grove
The places we have known do not belong only to the world of space on which we map them for our own convenience. None of them was ever more than a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; the memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.
MARCEL PROUST, Swann's Way
The great modification which the act of awakening effects in us is not so much that of ushering us into the clear life of consciousness, as that of making us lose all memory of the slightly more diffused light in which our mind had been resting, as in the opaline depths of the sea. The tide of thought, half veiled from our perception, on which we were still drifting a moment ago, kept us in a state of motion perfectly sufficent to enable us to refer to it by the name of wakefulness. But then our actual awakenings produce an interruption of memory. A little later we describe these states as sleep because we no longer remember them.
MARCEL PROUST, The Guermantes Way
Why, what in the world should we care for if it's not our lives, the only gift the Lord never offers us a second time?
MARCEL PROUST, Swann's Way
There is probably no one, however rigid his virtue, who is not liable to find himself, by the complexity of circumstances, living at close quarters with the very vice which he himself has been most outspoken in condemning -- without altogether recognizing it beneath the disguise of ambiguous behavior which it assumes in his presence.
MARCEL PROUST, Swann's Way
The tiny, initial clue ... by allowing us to imagine what we do not know, stimulates a desire for knowledge.
MARCEL PROUST, Swann's Way
Certainly, it is more reasonable to devote one's life to women than to postage stamps or old snuff-boxes, even to pictures or statues. But the example of other collections should be a warning to us to diversify, to have not one woman only but several.
MARCEL PROUST, The Guermantes Way
Even in the most insignificant details of our daily life, none of us can be said to constitute a material whole, which is identical for everyone, and need only be turned up like a page in an account-book or the record of a will; our social personality is a creation of the thoughts of other people.
MARCEL PROUST, Swann's Way
A photograph acquires something of the dignity which it ordinarily lacks when it ceases to be a reproduction of reality and shows us things that no longer exist.
MARCEL PROUST, Within a Budding Grove
I had long since given up trying to extract from a woman as it were the square root of her unknown quantity, the mystery of which a mere introduction was generally enough to dispel.
MARCEL PROUST, Sodom and Gomorrah
As to the pretty girls who went past, from the day on which I had first known that their cheeks could be kissed, I had become curious about their souls. And the Universe had appeared to me more interesting.
MARCEL PROUST, Within a Budding Grove
The facts of life do not penetrate to the sphere in which our beliefs are cherished; they did not engender those beliefs, and they are powerless to destroy them.
MARCEL PROUST, Swann's Way
When a belief vanishes, there survives it -- more and more vigorously so as to cloak the absence of the power, now lost to us, of imparting reality to new things -- a fetishistic attachment to the old things which it did once animate, as if it was in them and not in ourselves that the divine spark resided, and as if our present incredulity had a contingent cause -- the death of the gods.
MARCEL PROUST, Swann's Way
We strive all the time to give our life its form, but we do so by copying willy-nilly, like a drawing, the features of the person that we are and not of the person we should like to be.
MARCEL PROUST, The Guermantes Way
We may have revolved every possible idea in our minds, and yet the truth has never occurred to us, and it is from without, when we are least expecting it, that it gives us its cruel stab and wounds us forever.
MARCEL PROUST, Sodom and Gomorrah
Let but a single flash of reality -- the glimpse of a woman from afar or from behind -- enable us to project the image of Beauty before our eyes, and we imagine that we have recognised it, our hearts beat, and we will always remain half-persuaded that it was She, provided that the woman has vanished: it is only if we manage to overtake her that we realise our mistake.
MARCEL PROUST, Within a Budding Grove
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