Marcel Proust's Quotes

Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust (; French: [maʁsɛl pʁust]; 10 July 1871 – 18 November 1922) was a French novelist, critic, and essayist who wrote the monumental novel À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time; earlier rendered as Remembrance of Things Past), published in seven parts between 1913 and 1927. He is considered by critics and writers to be one of the most influential authors of the 20th century.

Marcel Proust's selected quotes:

Marcel Proust about Change:

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

Marcel Proust about Practice:

No exile at the South Pole or on the summit of Mont Blanc separates us more ...
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Marcel Proust about Eyes:

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

Marcel Proust about Truth:

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

Marcel Proust about Love:

A woman one loves rarely suffices for all our needs, so we deceive her with another ...
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Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust (; French: [maʁsɛl pʁust]; 10 July 1871 – 18 November 1922) was a French novelist, critic, and essayist who wrote the monumental novel À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time; earlier rendered as Remembrance of Things Past), published in seven parts amongst 1913 and 1927. He is considered by critics and writers to be one of the most influential authors of the 20th century.

All quotes from Marcel Proust sorted alphabetically:

Marcel Proust about Change:

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

Marcel Proust about Strength:

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

Marcel Proust about Opinion:

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.

Marcel Proust about Decisions:

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

Marcel Proust about Love:

A woman one loves rarely suffices for all our needs, so we deceive her with another whom we do not love.

Marcel Proust about Great:

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

Marcel Proust about Work:

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 about Freedom:

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.

Marcel Proust about Happiness:

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

Marcel Proust about Nature:

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

Marcel Proust about Try:

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

Marcel Proust about Time:

If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time.

Marcel Proust about Happiness:

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

Marcel Proust about Love:

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

Marcel Proust about Knowledge:

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

Marcel Proust about Knowledge:

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.

Marcel Proust about Mind:

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

Marcel Proust about Life:

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.

Marcel Proust about Friendship:

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

Marcel Proust about People:

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

Marcel Proust about Intelligence:

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

Marcel Proust about Love:

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.

Marcel Proust about Women:

Let us leave pretty women to men devoid of imagination.

Marcel Proust about Love:

Love is a reciprocal torture.

Marcel Proust about Practice:

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.

Marcel Proust about Love:

Love is space and time measured by the heart.

Marcel Proust about Life:

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

Marcel Proust about Art:

Only through art can we emerge from ourselves and know what another person sees.

Marcel Proust about Mind:

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

Marcel Proust about Time:

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

Marcel Proust about People:

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

Marcel Proust about Lost:

The only paradise is paradise lost.

Marcel Proust about Woman:

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

Marcel Proust about Travel:

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

Marcel Proust about Today:

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.

Marcel Proust about Eyes:

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

Marcel Proust about Life:

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.

Marcel Proust about Eyes:

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

Marcel Proust about Time:

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.

Marcel Proust about Book:

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

Marcel Proust about Life:

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.

Marcel Proust about Time:

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

Marcel Proust about Time:

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

Marcel Proust about Intelligence:

Three-quarters of the sicknesses of intelligent people come from their intelligence. They need at least a doctor who can understand this sickness.

Marcel Proust about Moving On:

We are healed from suffering only by experiencing it to the full.

Marcel Proust about Memory:

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.

Marcel Proust about Truth:

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

Marcel Proust about Wisdom:

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

Marcel Proust about Changes:

We do not succeed in changing things according to our desire, but gradually our desire changes.

Marcel Proust about Change:

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.

Marcel Proust about Love:

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

Marcel Proust about Soul:

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