200+ Quotes & Sayings By Marcel Proust

Marcel Proust was a French novelist, essayist and translator. His novel, À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time), is considered one of the major works of the 20th century. Proust was born on 7 July 1871 at Auteuil, near Paris. He died on 22 September 1922 in Paris at the age of 51.

Love is a striking example of how little reality means...
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Love is a striking example of how little reality means to us. Marcel Proust
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Now there is one thing I can tell you: you will enjoy certain pleasures you would not fathom now. When you still had your mother you often thought of the days when you would have her no longer. Now you will often think of days past when you had her. When you are used to this horrible thing that they will forever be cast into the past, then you will gently feel her revive, returning to take her place, her entire place, beside you. At the present time, this is not yet possible. Let yourself be inert, wait till the incomprehensible power .. that has broken you restores you a little, I say a little, for henceforth you will always keep something broken about you. Tell yourself this, too, for it is a kind of pleasure to know that you will never love less, that you will never be consoled, that you will constantly remember more and more. Marcel Proust
My destination is no longer a place, rather a new...
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My destination is no longer a place, rather a new way of seeing. Marcel Proust
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People do not die for us immediately, but remain bathed in a sort of aura oflife which bears no relation to true immortality but through which theycontinue to occupy our thoughts in the same way as when they were alive. Itis as though they were traveling abroad. Marcel Proust
One says the things which one feels the need to...
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One says the things which one feels the need to say, and which the other will not understand: one speaks for oneself alone. Marcel Proust
We don't receive wisdom we must discover it for ourselves.
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We don't receive wisdom we must discover it for ourselves. Marcel Proust
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I put down my cup and examine my own mind. It is for it to discover the truth. But how? What an abyss of uncertainty whenever the mind feels that some part of it has strayed beyond its own borders; when it, the seeker, is at once the dark region through which it must go seeking, where all its equipment will avail it nothing. Seek? More than that: create. It is face to face with something which does not so far exist, to which it alone can give reality and substance, which it alone can bring into the light of day. Marcel Proust
... Error, by force of contrast, enhances the triumph of...
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... Error, by force of contrast, enhances the triumph of Truth... Marcel Proust
When one feels oneself smitten by love for a woman,...
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When one feels oneself smitten by love for a woman, one ought to say to oneself, “What are her surroundings? What has been her life? All one’s future happiness lies in the answer. Marcel Proust
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We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us, which no one else can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world. The lives that you admire, the attitudes that seem noble to you, have not been shaped by paterfamilias or a schoolmaster, they have sprung from very different beginnings, having been influenced by everything evil or commonplace that prevailed round about them. They represent a struggle and a victory. I can see that picture of what we were at an earlier stage may not be recognisable and cannot, certainly, be pleasing to contemplate in later life. But we must not repudiate it, for it is a proof that we have really lived, that it is in accordance with the laws of life and of the mind that we have, from the common elements of life, of the life of studios, of artistic groups–assuming one is a painter–extracted something that transcends them. Marcel Proust
Do not wait for life. Do not long for it....
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Do not wait for life. Do not long for it. Be aware, always and at every moment, that the miracle is in the here and now. Marcel Proust
... there was no need for him to hasten towards...
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... there was no need for him to hasten towards the attainment of a happiness already captured and held in a safe place, which would not escape his grasp again. Marcel Proust
Much that for us is fraught with with happiness or...
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Much that for us is fraught with with happiness or misery, remains almost unnoticed by the rest of the world. Marcel Proust
... the idea that 'Life' contains situations more interesting and...
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... the idea that 'Life' contains situations more interesting and more romantic than all the romances ever written. Marcel Proust
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We have such numerous interests in our lives that it is not uncommon, on a single occasion, for the foundations of a happiness that does not yet exist to be laid down alongside the intensification of a grief from which we are still suffering. Marcel Proust
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We may, indeed, say that the hour of death is uncertain, but when we say so we represent that hour to ourselves as situated in a vague and remote expanse of time, it never occurs to us that it can have any connexion with the day that has already dawned, or may signify that death – or its first assault and partial possession of us, after which it will never leave hold of us again – may occur this very afternoon, so far from uncertain, this afternoon every hour of which has already been allotted to some occupation. You make a point of taking your drive every day so that in a month’s time you will have had the full benefit of the fresh air; you have hesitated over which cloak you will take, which cabman to call, you are in the cab, the whole day lies before you, short because you have to be at home early, as a friend is coming to see you; you hope that it will be as fine again to-morrow; and you have no suspicion that death, which has been making its way towards you along another plane, shrouded in an impenetrable darkness, has chosen precisely this day of all days to make its appearance, in a few minutes’ time, more or less, at the moment when the carriage has reached the Champs-Elysées. Marcel Proust
It is not because other people are dead that our...
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It is not because other people are dead that our affection for them grows faint, it is because we ourselves are dying. Marcel Proust
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I think that life would suddenly seem wonderful to us if we were threatened to die as you say. Just think of how many projects, travels, love affairs, studies, it—our life—hides from us, made invisible by our laziness which, certain of a future, delays them incessantly.‘ But let all this threaten to become impossible for ever, how beautiful it would become again! Ah! If only the cataclysm doesn’t happen this time, we won’t miss visiting the new galleries of the Louvre, throwing ourselves at the feet of Miss X, making a trip to India.‘The cataclysm doesn’t happen, we don’t do any of it, because we find ourselves back in the heart of normal life, where negligence deadens desire. And yet we shouldn’t have needed the cataclysm to love life today. It would have been enough to think that we are humans, and that death may come this evening. . Marcel Proust
For every death is a simplification of existence for the...
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For every death is a simplification of existence for the others, removes the necessity to show gratitude, the obligation to pay visits. Marcel Proust
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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. Marcel Proust
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The novelist’s happy discovery was to think of substituting for those opaque sections, impenetrable by the human spirit, their equivalent in immaterial sections, things, that is, which the spirit can assimilate to itself. After which it matters not that the actions, the feelings of this new order of creatures appear to us in the guise of truth, since we have made them our own, since it is in ourselves that they are happening, that they are holding in thrall, while we turn over, feverishly, the pages of the book, our quickened breath and staring eyes. And once the novelist has brought us to that state, in which, as in all purely mental states, every emotion is multiplied ten-fold, into which his book comes to disturb us as might a dream, but a dream more lucid, and of a more lasting impression than those which come to us in sleep; why, then, for the space of an hour he sets free within us all the joys and sorrows in the world, a few of which, only, we should have to spend years of our actual life in getting to know, and the keenest, the most intense of which would never have been revealed to us because the slow course of their development stops our perception of them. Marcel Proust
A work in which there are theories is like an...
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A work in which there are theories is like an object which still has its price-tag on. Marcel Proust
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And so too, in later years, when I began to write a book of my own, and the quality of some sentences seemed so inadequate that I could not make up my mind to go on with the undertaking. I would find the equivalent in Bergotte. But it was only then, when I read them in his pages, that I could enjoy them; when it was I myself who composed them, in my anxiety that they should exactly reproduce what I had perceived in my mind's eye, and in my fear of their not turning out "true to life, " how could I find time to ask myself whether what I was writing was pleasing! . Marcel Proust
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As long as reading is for us the instigator whose magic keys have opened the door to those dwelling-places deep within us that we would not have known how to enter, its role in our lives is salutary. It becomes dangerous, on the other hand, when, instead of awakening us to the personal life of the mind, reading tends to take its place, when the truth no longer appears to us as an ideal which we can realize only by the intimate progress of our own thought and the efforts of our heart, but as something material, deposited between the leaves of books like a honey fully prepared by others and which we need only take the trouble to reach down from the shelves of libraries and then sample passively in a perfect repose of mind and body. Marcel Proust
But, instead of what our imagination makes us suppose and...
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But, instead of what our imagination makes us suppose and which we worthless try to discover, life gives us something that we could hardly imagine. Marcel Proust
Everything that seems imperishable tends to extinguishment.
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Everything that seems imperishable tends to extinguishment. Marcel Proust
The time which we have at our disposal every day...
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The time which we have at our disposal every day is elastic; the passions that we feel expand it, those that we inspire contract it; and habit fills up what remains. Marcel Proust
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Many years have passed since that night. The wall of the staircase up which I had watched the light of his candle gradually climb was long ago demolished. And in myself, too, many things have perished which I imagined would last for ever, and new ones have arisen, giving birth to new sorrows and new joys which in those days I could not have foreseen, just as now the old are hard to understand. Marcel Proust
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Had I been less firmly resolved upon settling down definitively to work, I should perhaps have made an effort to begin at once. But since my resolution was explicit, since within twenty-four hours, in the empty frame of the following day where everything was so well-arranged because I myself was not yet in it, my good intention would be realized without difficulty, it was better not to start on an evening when I felt ill-prepared. The following days were not, alas, to prove more propitious. But I was reasonable. It would have been puerile, on the part of one who had waited now for years, not to put up with a postponement of two or three days. Confident that by the day after tomorrow I should have written several pages, I said not a word more to my parents of my decision; I preferred to remain patient and then to bring to a convinced and comforted grandmother a sample of work that was already under way. Unfortunately the next day was not that vast, extraneous expanse of time to which I had feverishly looked forward. When it drew to a close, my laziness and my painful struggle to overcome certain internal obstacles had simply lasted twenty-four hours longer. And at the end of several days, my plans not having matured, I had no longer the same hope that they would be realized at once, and hence no longer the heart to subordinate everything else to their realization: I began once again to keep late hours.. Marcel Proust
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But genius, and even great talent, springs less from seeds of intellect and social refinement superior to those of other people than from the faculty of transforming and transposing them. To heat a liquid with an electric lamp requires not the strongest lamp possible, but one of which the current can cease to illuminate, can be diverted so as to give heat instead of light. To mount the skies it is not necessary to have the most powerful of motors, one must have a motor which, instead of continuing to run along the earth's surface, intersecting with a vertical line the horizontal line which it began by following, is capable of converting its speed into lifting power. Similarly, the men who produce works of genius are not those who live in the most delicate atmosphere, whose conversation is the most brilliant or their culture the most extensive, but those who have had the power, ceasing suddenly to live only for themselves, to transform their personality into a sort of mirror, in such a way that their life, however mediocre it may be socially and even, in a sense, intellectually, is reflected by it, genius consisting in reflecting power and not int he intrinsic quality of the scene reflected. . Marcel Proust
The creation of the world did not occur at the...
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The creation of the world did not occur at the beginning of time, it occurs every day. Marcel Proust
Reading is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the...
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Reading is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude. Marcel Proust
There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived...
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There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we believe we left without having lived them, those we spent with a favorite book. Marcel Proust
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In reading, friendship is restored immediately to its original purity. With books there is no forced sociability. If we pass the evening with those friends–books–it’s because we really want to. When we leave them, we do so with regret and, when we have left them, there are none of those thoughts that spoil friendship: “What did they think of us?”–“ Did we make a mistake and say something tactless?”–“ Did they like us?”–nor is there the anxiety of being forgotten because of displacement by someone else. All such agitating thoughts expire as we enter the pure and calm friendship of reading. Marcel Proust
On no days of our childhood did we live so...
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On no days of our childhood did we live so fully perhaps as those we thought we had left behind without living them, those that we spent with a favourite book. Marcel Proust
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In the sort of screen dappled with different states of mind which my consciousness would simultaneously unfold while I read, and which ranged from the aspirations hidden deepest within me to the completely exterior vision of the horizon which I had, at the bottom of the garden, before my eyes, what was first in me, innermost, the constantly moving handle that controlled the rest, was my belief in the philosophical richness and beauty of the book I was reading, and my desire to appropriate them for myself, whatever that book might be. Marcel Proust
No days, perhaps, of all our childhood are ever so...
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No days, perhaps, of all our childhood are ever so fully lived are those that we had regarded as not being lived at all: days spent wholly with a favourite book. Marcel Proust
A book is no mere book anymore than man can...
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A book is no mere book anymore than man can be mere man. A book was like an individual man, unmatched and with no cause of existence beyond himself. Marcel Proust
This book of mine has not been manufactured: it has...
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This book of mine has not been manufactured: it has been garnered. Marcel Proust
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He suffered greatly from being shut up among all these people whose stupidity and absurdities wounded him all the more cruelly since, being ignorant of his love, incapable, had they known of it, of taking any interest, or of doing more than smile at it as at some childish joke, or deplore it as an act of insanity, they made it appear to him in the aspect of a subjective state which existed for himself alone, whose reality there was nothing external to confirm; he suffered overwhelmingly, to the point at which even the sound of the instruments made him want to cry, from having to prolong his exile in this place to which Odette would never come, in which no one, nothing was aware of her existence, from which she was entirely absent. Marcel Proust
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All the objects which he contemplated with as much curiosity and admiration as gratitude, for if, in absorbing his dreams, they had delivered him from an obsession, they themselves were, in turn, enriched by the absorption; they shewed him the palpable realisation of his fancies, and they interested his mind; they took shape and grew solid before his eyes, and at the same time they soothed his troubled heart. Marcel Proust
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Without inquiring too deeply into the causes which make it possible to find subjects of gaiety always close at hand, the proof of that possibility can be found in the fact that persons of sensitive intelligence are capable of finding comic potentialities in everything and everybody, thereby demonstrating that if some people hold the belief that there is very little that is laughable in the world, the reason is that they lack the ability to find it. Marcel Proust
Let us leave pretty women to men with no imagination.
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Let us leave pretty women to men with no imagination. Marcel Proust
With women who do not love us, as with the...
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With women who do not love us, as with the "dear departed, " the knowledge that there is no hope left does not prevent us from continuing to wait. Marcel Proust
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To achieve accurate knowledge of others, if such a thing were possible, we could only ever arrive at it through the slow and unsure recognition of our own initial optical inaccuracies. However, such knowledge is not possible: for, while our vision of others is being adjusted, they, who are not made of mere brute matter, are also changing; we think we have managed to see them more clearly, but they shift; and when we believe we have them fully in focus, it is merely our older images of them that we have clarified, but which are themselves already out of date. Marcel Proust
I was not one man only but the steady advance...
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I was not one man only but the steady advance hour after hour of an army in close formation, in which there appeared, according to the moment, impassioned men, indifferent men, jealous men. Marcel Proust
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The impression given us by a person or a work (or an interpretation of a work) of marked individuality is peculiar to that person or work. We have brought with us the ideas of “beauty, ” “breadth of style, ” “pathos” and so forth which we might at a pinch have the illusion of recognising in the banality of a conventional face or talent, but our critical spirit has before it the insistent challenge of a form of which it possesses no intellectual equivalent, in which it must disengage the unknown element. It hears a sharp sound, an oddly interrogative inflexion. It asks itself: “Is that good? Is what I am feeling now admiration? Is that what is meant by richness of colouring, nobility, strength?” And what answers it again is a sharp voice, a curiously questioning tone, the despotic impression, wholly material, caused by a person whom one does not know, in which no scope is left for “breadth of interpretation.” And for this reason it is the really beautiful works that, if we listen to them with sincerity, must disappoint us most keenly, because in the storehouse of our ideas there is none that responds to an individual impression. . Marcel Proust
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For even if we have the sensation of being always surrounded by our own soul, it is not as though by a motionless prison: rather, we are in some sense borne along with it in a perpetual leap to go beyond it. Marcel Proust
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Our vanity, our passions, our spirit of imitation, our abstract intelligence, our habits have long been at work, and it is the task of art to undo this work of theirs, making us travel back in the direction from which we have come to the depths where what has really existed lies unknown within us. Marcel Proust
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All the products of one period have something in common; the artists who illustrate the poetry of their generation are the same artists who are employed by the big financial houses. And nothing reminds me so much of the monthly parts of Notre-Dame de Paris, and of various books by Gérard de Nerval, that used to hang outside the grocer's door at Combray, than does, in its rectangular and flowery border, supported by recumbent river-gods, a 'personal share' in the Water Company. Marcel Proust
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We enjoy lovely music, beautiful paintings, a thousand intellectual delicacies, but we have no idea of their cost, to those who invented them, in sleepless nights, tears, spasmodic laughter, rashes, asthmas, epilepsies, and the fear of death, which is worse than all the rest. Marcel Proust
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As for me, I feel myself living and thinking in a room where everything is the creation and the language of lives profoundly different from mine, of a taste opposite to mine, where I find nothing of my conscious thought, where my imagination is excited by feeling itself plunged into the depths of the non-ego; I feel happy only when setting foot–on the Avenue de la Gare, on the Port, or on the Place de l' Eglise–in one of those provincial hotels with cold, long corridors where the wind from outside contends successfully with the efforts of the heating system, where the detailed geographic map of the district is still the sole ornament on the walls, where each noise helps only to make the silence appear by displacing it, where the rooms keep a musty perfume which the open air comes to wash, but does not eliminate, and which the nostrils inhale a hundred times in order to bring it to the imagination, which is enchanted with it, which has it pose like a model to try to recreate it with all the thoughts and remembrances that it contains.. Marcel Proust
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Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself. Marcel Proust
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Just is not by other men of intelligence that an intelligent an is afraid of being thought a fool, so it is not by the great gentleman but by boors and 'bounders' that a man of fashion is afraid of finding his social value underrated. Three-fourths of the mental ingenuity displayed, of the social falsehoods scattered broadcast ever since the world began by people whose importance they have served only to diminish, have been aimed at inferiors. Marcel Proust
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You know Balbec so well - do you have friends in the area?' I have friends wherever there are companies of trees, wounded but not vanquished, which huddle together with touching obstinacy to implore an inclement and pitiless sky.' That is not what I meant, ' interrupted my father, as obstinate as the trees and as pitiless as the sky. Marcel Proust
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She observed the dumb-show by which her neighbour was expressing her passion for music, but she refrained from copying it. This was not to say that, for once that she had consented to spend a few minutes in Mme. de Saint-Euverte's house, the Princesse des Laumes would not have wished (so that the act of politeness to her hostess which she had performed by coming might, so to speak, 'count double') to shew herself as friendly and obliging as possible. But she had a natural horror of what she called 'exaggerating, ' and always made a point of letting people see that she 'simply must not' indulge in any display of emotion that was not in keeping with the tone of the circle in which she moved, although such displays never failed to make an impression upon her, by virtue of that spirit of imitation, akin to timidity, which is developed in the most self-confident persons, by contact with an unfamiliar environment, even though it be inferior to their own. She began to ask herself whether these gesticulations might not, perhaps, be a necessary concomitant of the piece of music that was being played, a piece which, it might be, was in a different category from all the music that she had ever heard before; and whether to abstain from them was not a sign of her own inability to understand the music, and of discourtesy towards the lady of the house; with the result that, in order to express by a compromise both of her contradictory inclinations in turn, at one moment she would merely straighten her shoulder-straps or feel in her golden hair for the little balls of coral or of pink enamel, frosted with tiny diamonds, which formed its simple but effective ornament, studying, with a cold interest, her impassioned neighbour, while at another she would beat time for a few bars with her fan, but, so as not to forfeit her independence, she would beat a different time from the pianist's. Marcel Proust
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We needed germans in Paris to hear Wagner. Marcel Proust
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Why did you not forget your heart also? I should never have let you have that back." ... Marcel Proust
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After a certain age, and even if we develop in quite different ways, the more we become ourselves, the more our family traits are accentuated. Marcel Proust
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Having a body is in itself the greatest threat to the mind... The body encloses the mind in a fortress; before long the mind is besieged on all sides, and in the end the mind has to give itself up. Marcel Proust
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It is grief that develops the powers of the mind. Marcel Proust
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Every woman feels that the greater her power over a man, the more impossible it is to leave him except by sudden flight: a fugitive precisely because a queen. Marcel Proust
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... the courage of one's opinions is always a form of calculating cowardice in the eyes of the 'other side'... Marcel Proust
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To such an extent does passion manifest itself in us as a temporary and distinct character, which not only takes the place of our normal character but actually obliterates the signs by which that character has hitherto been discernible. Marcel Proust
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Bodily passion, which has been so unjustly decried, compels its victims to display every vestige that is in them of unselfishness and generosity, and so effectively that they shine resplendent in the eyes of all beholders. Marcel Proust
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But I consoled myself with the reflexion that in spite of everything she was for me the real point of intersection between reality and dream. Marcel Proust
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And in myself, too, many things have perished which, I imagined, would last for ever, and new structures have arisen, giving birth to new sorrows and new joys which in those days I could not have foreseen, just as now the old are difficult of comprehension. Marcel Proust
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So difficult is it for us to know, with the dead as with the living, whether a thing would cause them joy or sorrow! Marcel Proust
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She was capable of causing me pain, but no longer any joy. Pain alone kept my wearisome attachment alive. Marcel Proust
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And the others too were beginning to remark in Swann that abnormal, excessive, shameful and deserved senescence of bachelors, of all those for whom it seems that the great day which knows no morrow must be longer than for other men, since for them it is a void of promise, and from its dawn the moments steadily accumulate without any subsequent partition among offspring. Marcel Proust
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… it would even be inexact to say that I thought of those who read it as readers of my book. Because they were not, as I saw it, my readers. More exactly they were readers of themselves, my book being a sort of magnifying glass … by which I could give them the means to read within themselves. Marcel Proust
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The fault I find with our journalism is that it forces us to take an interest in some fresh triviality or other every day, whereas only three or four books in a lifetime give us anything that is of real importance. Marcel Proust
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She's on the stairs, ma'am, getting her breath, ' said the young servant, who had not been long up from the country, where my mother had the excellent habit of getting all her servants. Often she had seen them born. That's the only way to get really good ones. And they're the rarest of luxuries. Marcel Proust
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Look you, there are only two classes of men, the magnanimous, and the rest; and I have reached an age when one has to take sides, to decide once and for all whom one is going to like and dislike, to stick to the people one likes, and, to make up for the time one has wasted with the others, never to leave them again as long as one lives. Marcel Proust
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... she exclaimed, the innate respectability of the middle-class housewife rising impulsively to the surface through the acquired dilettantism of the 'light woman.' People who enjoyed 'picking-up' things, who admired poetry, despised sordid calculations of profit and loss, and nourished ideals of honour and love, she placed in a class by themselves, superior to the rest of humanity. Marcel Proust
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He had, indeed, one of those advantages which men who had lived and moved in the world enjoy over others, even men of intelligence and refinement, who have never gone into society, namely that they no longer see it transfigured by the longing or repulsion with which it fills the imagination, but regard it as quite unimportant. Their good nature, freed from all taint of snobbishness and from the fear of seeming too friendly, grown independent, in fact, has the ease, the grace of movement of a trained gymnast each of whose supple limbs will carry out precisely the movement that is required without any clumsy participation by the rest of his body. Marcel Proust
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But when his mistress for the time being was a woman in society, or at least one whose birth was not so lowly, nor her position is so irregular that he was unable to arrange for her reception in 'society, ' then for her sake he would return to it, but only to the particular orbit in which she moved or into which he had drawn her. Marcel Proust
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It has since struck me as one of the most touching aspects of the part played in life by these idle, painstaking women that they devote all their generosity, all their talent, their transferable dreams of sentimental beauty (for, like all artists, they never seek to realise the value of those dreams, or to enclose them in the four-square frame of everyday life), and their gold, which counts for little, to the fashioning of a fine and precious setting for the rubbed and scratched and ill-polished lives of men. Marcel Proust
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... rejoicing in a peace which brings only an increase of anxiety, ... Marcel Proust
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... the good intentions of a third party are powerless to control a woman who is annoyed to find herself pursued even into a ball-room by a man whom she does not love. Too often, the kind friend comes down again alone. Marcel Proust
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My dears, laugh at me if you like; it is not conventionally beautiful, but there is something in its quaint old face which pleases me. If it could play the piano, I am sure it would really play. Marcel Proust
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... they imagine that the life they are obliged to lead is not that for which they are really fitted, and they bring to their regular occupations either a fantastic indifference or a sustained and lofty application, scornful, bitter, and conscientious. Marcel Proust
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And if Francoise then, inspired like a poet with a flood of confused reflections upon bereavement, grief, and family memories, were to plead her inability to rebut my theories, saying: "I don't know how to espress (sic) myself" - I would triumph over her with an ironical and brutal common sense worthy of Dr. Percepied; and if she went on: "All the same she was a geological (sic) relation; there is always the respect due to your geology (sic), " I would shrug my shoulders and say: "It is really very good of me to discuss the matter with an illiterate old woman who cannot speak her own language, " adopting, to deliver judgment on Francoise, the mean and narrow outlook of the pedant, whom those who are most contemptuous of him in the impartiality of their own minds are only too prone to copy when they are obliged to play a part upon the vulgar stage of life. Marcel Proust
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It may well have been, too, that the smiling moderation with which she faced and answered these blasphemies, that this tender and hypocritical rebuke appeared to her frank and generous nature as a particularly shameful and seductive form of that criminal attitude towards life which she was endeavouring to adopt. But she could not resist the attraction of being treated with affection by a woman who had just shewn herself so implacable towards the defenceless dead; she sprang on to the knees of her friend and held out a chaste brow to be kissed;.. Marcel Proust
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At the moment when, ordinarily, there was still an hour to be lived through before meal-time sounded, we would all know that in a few seconds we should see the endives make their precocious appearance, followed by the special favour of an omelette, an unmerited steak. The return of this asymmetrical Saturday was one of those petty occurrences, intra-mural, localised, almost civic, which, in uneventful lives and stable orders of society, create a kind of national unity, and become the favourite theme for conversation, for pleasantries, for anecdotes which can be embroidered as the narrator pleases; it would have provided a nucleus, ready-made, for a legendary cycle, if any of us had had the epic mind. Marcel Proust
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She [Mme des Laumes] belonged to that half of the human race in whom the curiosity the other half feels about the people it does not know is replaced by an interest in the people it does. Marcel Proust
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All the while that Jean was listening to him, he was vaguely conscious that what gives literature its reality is the result of work accomplished by the human spirit, no matter what the material facts that may have stimulated it (a walk, a night of love, a social drama), of a sort of discovery in the world of the spirit, of the emotions, made by the human intelligence, so that the value of a book is never in the material presented by the writer, but in the nature of the operation he performs upon it. Marcel Proust
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As with the future, it is not all at once but grain by grain that one savours the past. Marcel Proust
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She's got feet like boats, whiskers like an American, and her undies are filthy. Marcel Proust
90
This compulsion to an activity without respite, without variety, without result was so cruel that one day, noticing a swelling over his stomach, he felt an actual joy in the idea that he had, perhaps, a tumor that would prove fatal, that he need not concern himself with anything further, since it was this malady that was going to govern his life, to make a plaything of him, until the not-distant end. If indeed, at his period, it often happened that, though without admitting it even to himself, he longed for death, it was in order to escape not so much from the keenness of his sufferings as from the monotony of his struggle. Marcel Proust
91
He had so long since ceased to direct his life toward any ideal goal, and had confined himself to the pursuit of quotidian satisfactions, that he had come to believe, though without ever formally stating his belief even to himself that he would remain all his life in that condition, which only death could alter. Marcel Proust
92
And once the novelist has brought us to this state, in which, as in all purely mental states, every emotion is multiplied ten-fold, into which his book comes to disturb us as might a dream, but a dream more lucid and more abiding than those which come to us in sleep, why then, for the space of an hour he sets free within us all the joys and sorrows in the world, a few of which only we should have to spend years of our actual life in getting to know, and the most intense of which would never be revealed to us because the slow course of their development prevents us from perceiving them. It is the same in life; the heart changes, and it is our worst sorrow; but we know it only through reading, through our imagination: in reality its alteration, like that of certain natural phenomena, is so gradual that, even if we are able to distinguish, successively, each of its different states, we are still spared the actual sensation of change. Marcel Proust
93
.. endowing the imperfect and the preterite with all the sweetness which there is in generosity, all the melancholy which there is in love; guided the sentence that was drawing to an end towards that which was waiting to begin, now hastening, now slackening the pace of the syllables so as to bring them, despite their difference in quantity, into a uniform rhythm, and breathed into this quite ordinary prose a kind of life, continuous and full of feeling. Marcel Proust
94
Real life, life finally uncovered and clarified, the only life in consequence lived to the full, is literature. Life in this sense dwells within all ordinary people as much as the artist. But they do not see it because they are not trying to shed light on it. Marcel Proust
95
..the mode by which he "heard" the universe and projected it far beyond himself. Perhaps it was in this, I said to Albertine, this unknown quality of a unique world which no other composer had ever yet revealed, that the most authentic proof of genius lies, even more than in the content of the work itself. "Even in literature?” Albertine inquired. “Even in literature.” And thinking again of the sameness of Vinteuil’s works, I explained to Albertine that the great men of letters have never created more than a single work, or rather have never done more than refract through various media an identical beauty which they bring into the world. “If it were not so late, my sweet, ” I said to her, “I would show you this quality in all the writers whose works you read while I’m asleep, I would show you the same identity as in Vinteuil. These key-phrases, which you are beginning to recognise as I do, my little Albertine, the same in the sonata, in the septet, in the other works, would be, say for instance in Barbey d Aurevilly, a hidden reality revealed by a physical sign, the physiological blush.. Marcel Proust
96
Now I could appreciate the merits of a broad, poetical, powerful interpretation, or rather it was to this that those epithets were conventionally applied, but only as we give the names of Mars, Venus, Saturn to planets which have nothing mythological about them. We feel in one world, we think, we give names to things in another; between the two we can establish a certain correspondence, but not bridge the gap. Marcel Proust
97
... she had uttered these words simply in order to provoke a reply in certain other words, which she seemed, indeed, to wish to hear spoken, but, from prudence, would let her friend be the first to speak. Marcel Proust
98
That our words are, as a general rule, filled by the people to whom we address them with a meaning which those people desire from their own substance, a meaning widely different from that which we had put into the same words when we uttered them, is a fact which is perpetually demonstrated in daily life. Marcel Proust
99
Aunt Léonie who, after the death of her husband, my Uncle Octave, no longer wished to leave, first Combray, then within Combray her house, then her bedroom, then her bed and no longer 'came down', always lying in an uncertain state of grief, physical debility, illness, obsession and piety. Marcel Proust
100
We have nothing to fear and a great deal to learn from trees, that vigorours and pacific tribe which without stint produces strengthening essences for us, soothing balms, and in whose gracious company we spend so many cool, silent, and intimate hours. Marcel Proust