Marcel Proust's Quotes

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Love is a reciprocal torture.

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.

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.

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

Love is space and time measured by the heart.

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

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

Let us leave pretty women to men devoid of imagination.