Marcel Proust quotes:

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

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

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.

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.

Love is space and time measured by the heart.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

For everyone who, having no artistic sense-that is to say, no submission to subjective reality-may have the knack of reasoning about art till doomsday, especially if he be, in addition, a diplomat or financier in contact with the 'realities' of the present day, is only too ready to believe literature is an intellectual game which is destined to gradually be abandoned as time goes on.

Why did you not forget your heart also? I should never have let you have that back.

It is the same in life: the heart changes, and that is our worst misfortune, but we learn of it only from reading or by imagination, for 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.

For with the perturbations of memory are linked the intermittencies of the heart.

And so her parents-in-law, whom she still regarded as the most eminent people in France, declared that she was an angel; all the more so because they preferred to appear, in marrying their son to her, to have yielded to the attraction rather of her natural charm than of her considerable fortune.

With graceful deviations in which caprice is blended with virtuosity

I was left alone there in the company of the orchids, roses and violets, which, like people waiting beside you who do not know you, preserved a silence which their individuality as living things made all the more striking, and warmed themselves in the heat of a glowing coal fire...

Aristocracy is relative: there are all sorts of inexpensive little resorts where the son of a furniture salesman may be the arbiter of all things elegant, holding court like a young Prince of Wales."

The ineffable utterance of one solitary man, absent, perhaps dead (Swann did not know whether Vinteuil were still alive), breathed out above the rites of those two hierophants, sufficed to arrest the attention of three hundred minds, and made of that stage on which a soul was thus called into being one of the noblest altars on which a supernatural ceremony could be performed."

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

Memory, instead of being a duplicate, always present before one's eyes, of the various events of one's life, is rather a void from which at odd moments a chance resemblance enables ones to resuscitate dead recollections, but even then, there are innumerable little details which have not fallen into that potential reservoir of memory, and which will remain for ever unverifiable."

What most enraptured me were the asparagus."

The charms of a passing woman are usually in direct relation to the speed of her passing."

At that moment, noticing that his embroidered handkerchief was revealing part of its coloured edging, he thrust it back into his pocket with a startled glance, like a prudish but not innocent woman concealing bodily charms which in her excessive modesty she sees as wanton."

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

Le bonheur est dans l'amour un e tat anormal. In love, happiness is abnormal.

La possession de ce qu'on aime est une joie plus grande encore que l'amour. Possessing what one loves is an even greater joy than love itself.

It is often hard to bear the tears that we ourselves have caused.

A sleeping man holds in a circle around him the thread of the hours, the order of years and of worlds. He consults them instinctively upon awaking and in one second reads in them the point of the earth that he occupies, the time past until his arousal; but their ranks can be mingled or broken.

Le temps qui change les e" tres ne modifie pas l'image que nous avons garde e d'eux. Although time changes people, it cannot change the image we have already made of them.

Let us be grateful to people who make us happy.

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

People who are not in love fail to understand how an intelligent man can suffer because of a very ordinary woman. This is like being surprised that anyone should be stricken with cholera because of a creature so insignificant as the common bacillus.

People who, not being in love themselves, feel that a clever man should only be unhappy about a person who is worth his while; which is rather like being astonished that anyone should condescend to die of cholera at the bidding of so insignificant a creature as the comma bacillus.

No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me.

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

The disinterest [of my two great-aunts] in anything that had to do with high society was such that their sense of hearing ... put to rest its receptor organs and allowed them to suffer the true beginnings of atrophy.

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

In his younger days a man dreams of possessing the heart of the woman whom he loves; later, the feeling that he possesses the heart of a woman may be enough to make him fall in love with her.

No days, perhaps, of all our childhood are ever so fully lived as those that we had regarded as not being lived at all: days spent wholly with a favourite book. Everything that seemed to fill them full for others we pushed aside, because it stood between us and the pleasures of the Gods.

The sensitiveness claimed by neurotic is matched by their egotism: they cannot abide the flaunting by others of the sufferings to which they pay an even increasing amount of attention in themselves.

Masterpieces are no more than the shipwrecked flotsam of great minds.

To write that essential book, a great writer does not need to invent it but merely to translate it, since it already exists in each one of us. The duty and task of a writer are those of translator.

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

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

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

Unkind people imagine themselves to be inflicting pain on someone equally unkind.

The duty and the task of a writer are those of an interpreter.

It is always thus, impelled by a state of mind which is destined not to last, we make our irrevocable decisions

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

So we don't believe that life is beautiful because we don't recall it but if we get a whiff of a long-forgotten smell we are suddenly intoxicated and similarly we think we no longer love the dead because we don't remember them but if by chance we come across an old glove we burst into tears.

The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it....

For each illness that doctors cure with medicine, they provoke ten in healthy people by inoculating them with the virus that is a thousand times more powerful than any microbe: the idea that one is ill.

It is comforting when one has a sorrow to lie in the warmth of one's bed and there, abandoning all effort and all resistance, to bury even one's head under the cover, giving one's self up to it completely, moaning like branches in the autumn wind. But there is still a better bed, full of divine odors. It is our sweet, our profound, our impenetrable friendship.

One becomes moral as soon as one is unhappy.

Neurosis has an absolute genius for malingering. There is no illness which it cannot counterfeit perfectly. If it is capable of deceiving the doctor, how should it fail to deceive the patient

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

The features of our face are hardly more than gestures which force of habit made permanent. Nature, like the destruction of Pompeii, like the metamorphosis of a nymph into a tree, has arrested us in an accustomed movement.

But to ask pity of our body is like discoursing in front of an octopus, for which our words can have no more meaning than the sound of the tides, and with which we should be appalled to find ourselves condemned to live.

There are optical illusions in time as well as space.

For neither our greatest fears nor our greatest hopes are beyond the limits of our strength--we are able in the end both to dominate the first and to achieve the second.

Even though our lives wander, our memories remain in one place.

The only paradise is paradise lost.

My dear Madame, I just noticed that I forgot my cane at your house yesterday; please be good enough to give it to the bearer of this letter. P.S. Kindly pardon me for disturbing you; I just found my cane.

I understood that all the material of a literary work was in my past life, I understood that I had acquired it in the midst of frivolous amusements, in idleness, in tenderness and in pain, stored up by me without my divining its destination or even its survival, as the seed has in reserve all the ingredients which will nourish the plant.

Even the simple act that we call "going to visit a person of our acquaintance" is in part an intellectual act. We fill the physical appearance of the person we see with all the notions we have about him, and in the totality of our impressions about him, these notions play the most important role.

Poets claim that we recapture for a moment the self that we were long ago when we enter some house or garden in which we used to live in our youth. But these are most hazardous pilgrimages, which end as often in disappointment as in success. It is in ourselves that we should rather seek to find those fixed places, contemporaneous with different years.

True variety is in that plenitude of real and unexpected elements, in the branch charged with blue flowers thrusting itself, against all expectations, from the springtime hedge which seems already too full, while the purely formal imitation of varietyis but void and uniformity, that is, that which is most opposed to variety....

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 can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world.

Laissons les jolies femmes aux hommes sans imagination. Leave the pretty women for the men without imagination.

Proust was the greatest novelist of the twentieth century, just as Tolstoy was in the nineteenth.

To the pure all things are pure!

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

Habit! that skilful but slow-moving arranger who begins by letting our minds suffer for weeks on end in temporary quarters, but whom our minds are none the less only too happy to discover at last, for without it, reduced to their own devices, they would be powerless to make any room seem habitable.

In reality, in love there is a permanent suffering which joy neutralizes, renders virtual delays, but which can at any moment become what it would have become long earlier if one had not obtained what one wanted -- atrocious.

There's nothing like desire to prevent the things one says from having any resemblance to the things in one's mind.

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.

What criterion ought one to adopt to judge one's fellows? After all, there was not a single person he knew who might not, in certain circumstances, prove capable of a shameful action.

But certain favourite roles are played by us so often before the public and rehearsed so carefully when we are alone that we find it easier to refer to their fictitious testimony than to that of a reality which we have almost entirely forgotten.

...the nose is generally the organ in which stupidity is most readily displayed.

M. de Charlus persisted in not replying. I thought I could see a smile flicker about his lips: the smile of the man who looks down from a great height on the characters and manners of lesser men.

...a writer's works, like the water in an artesian well, mount to a height which is in proportion to the depth to which suffering has penetrated his soul.

... my body ... faithful guardian of a past which my mind should never have forgotten, brought back before my eyes ....

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.

... with a quiet suggestion of infinity...

... I felt that I was not penetrating to the full depth of my impression, that something more lay behind that mobility, that luminosity, something which they seemed at once to contain and to conceal.

...of all the seeds that fly about the world, the one with the most solid wings, enabling it to be scattered at the greatest distance from its point of origin, is still a joke.

... the courage of one's opinions is always a form of calculating cowardice in the eyes of the 'other side'...

... it had arrested for all eternity the moment which it had been trying to make pass more quickly.

... which would enable him to prolong for the time being, and to renew for one day more the disappointment, the torturing deception that must always come to him with the vain presence of this woman, whom he might approach, yet never dared embrace.

... Odette seemed a fascinating and desirable woman, the attraction which her body held for him had aroused a painful longing to secure the absolute mastery of even the tiniest particles of her heart.

... "It smells all right; it makes your head go round; it catches your breath; you feel ticklish all over - and not the faintest clue how it's done. The man's a sorcerer; the thing's a conjuring trick, it's a miracle,"...

As with the future, it is not all at once but grain by grain that one savours the past.

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.

She can't have understood you: you are so utterly different from ordinary men. That's what I liked about you when I first saw you; I felt at once that you weren't like everybody else.

A 'real' person, profoundly as we may sympathise with him, is in a great measure perceptible only through our senses, that is to say, he remains opaque, offers a dead weight which our sensibilities have not the strength to lift.

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.

We ought never to lose our tempers with people who, when we find them at fault, begin to snigger. They do so not because they are laughing at us, but because they are afraid of our displeasure.

In most women's lives, everything, even the greatest sorrow, comes down to a question of 'I haven't got a thing to wear'.

It is often simply from lack of creative imagination that we do not go far enough in suffering.

Only imagination and belief can differentiate from the rest certain objects, certain people, and can create an atmosphere.

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.

M. de Charlus made no reply and looked as if he had not heard, which was one of his favourite forms of rudeness.

...pretention is very close to stupidity and that simplicity has a less visible but still gratifying aspect.

I could no longer desire physically without feeling a need for her, without suffering from her absence.

We consider it innocent to desire, and heinous that the other person should do so.