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
Some Similar Quotes
  1. Productiveness is your acceptance of morality, your recognition of the fact that you choose to live--that productive work is the process by which man's consciousness controls his existence, a constant process of acquiring knowledge and shaping matter to fit one's purpose, of translating an idea... - Ayn Rand

  2. I think that you’ve got to make something that pleases you and hope that other people feel the same way. - Thomas Keller

  3. All our knowledge has its origin in our perceptions - Leonardo Da Vinci

  4. What keeps life fascinating is the constant creativity of the soul. - Deepak Chopra

  5. Anymore, no one's mind is their own. - Chuck Palahniuk

More Quotes By Marcel Proust
  1. Love is a striking example of how little reality means to us.

  2. 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...

  3. My destination is no longer a place, rather a new way of seeing.

  4. 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...

  5. One says the things which one feels the need to say, and which the other will not understand: one speaks for oneself alone.

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