The real stars of society are tired of appearing there. He who is curious to gaze at them must often migrate to another hemisphere, where they are more or less alone.

We passionately long for there to be another life in which we shall be similar to what we are here below. But we do not paust to reflect that, even without waiting for that other life, in this life, after a few years, we are unfaithful to what we once were, to what we wished to remain immortally. Even without supposing that death is to alter us more completely than the changes that occur in the course of our lives, if in that other life were were to encounter the self that we have been, we should turn away from ourselves as from those people with whom we were once on friendly terms but whom we have not seen for years.

Altogether, I had derived little benefit from being in Balbec, for which reason I was all the more determined to come back one day. I felt I had spent too short a time there.

MARCEL PROUST, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower

The true paradises are the paradises that we have lost.

MARCEL PROUST, Time Regained

Let us leave pretty women to men with no imagination.

MARCEL PROUST, The Captive & The Fugitive

All that I grasped was that to repeat what everybody else was thinking was, in politics, the mark not of an inferior but of a superior mind.

MARCEL PROUST, Within a Budding Grove

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

MARCEL PROUST, Pleasures and Days

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

MARCEL PROUST, In Search of Lost Time

We shall see later on that the diversity of the forms of death that circulate invisibly is the cause of the peculiar unexpectedness of obituary notices in the newspapers.