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Marcel Proust Quotes - Page 10

All Quotes Adultery Age Aids Appearance Art Attitude Belief Change Character Children Communication Creation Death Desire Doubt Duty Dying Earth Effort Failing Fashion Feelings Friendship Genius Giving Grief Grieving Happiness Happy Heart History House Humanity Illness Imagination Inspirational Journey Joy Kindness Knowledge Language Learning Life Literature Love Lying Magic Memories Morning Pain Passion Past Personality Philosophy Pleasure Quality Reading Reality Regret Sacrifice Science Silence Sleep Son Sorrow Soul Suffering Time Truth Understanding Virtue Vision Waiting War Water Wisdom Writing Youth

Perfume is that last and best reserve of the past, the one which when all out tears have run dry, can make us cry again!

Perfume is that last and best reserve of the past, the one which when all out tears have run dry, can make us cry again!

Running, Past, Tears

Photography is the product of complete alienation.

Photography, Alienation, Products

Lies are essential to humanity.

Lying, Humanity, Essentials

1925 A' la recherche du temps perdu,'Albertine disparue'.

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.

Art, Believe, Reality

Not caring for their lives' is it? Why, what in the world is there that we should care for if it's not our lives, the only gift the Lord never offers us a second time.

Caring, World, Care

Marcel Proust (2016). “In Search of Lost Time: Or “Á la Recherche du temps perdu””, p.90, Jester House Publishing

We can only be faithful to what we remember, and we remember only what we have known.

Faithful, Remember, Being Faithful

Marcel Proust (2003). “In Search of Lost Time: The Way by Swann's”, ePenguin

That abominable and sensual act called reading the newspaper, thanks to which all the misfortunes and cataclysms in the universe over the last twenty-four hours, the battles which cost the lives of fifty-thousand men, the murders, the strikes, the bankruptcies, the fires, the poisonings, the suicides, the divorces, the cruel emotions of statesmen and actors, are transformed for us, who don't even care, into a morning treat, blending in wonderfully, in a particularly exciting and tonic way, with the recommended ingestion of a few sips of cafe au lait.

Suicide, Morning, Reading

When I was small child, all that belonged to conservative society was fashionable, and no republicans were welcome in the smartersalons. People living in such a milieu could imagine that the impossibility of ever inviting an "opportunist", much less a "radical", was a thing that would last forever, like gas lamps and horse-drawn omnibuses. But similar to kaleidoscopes turning from time to time, society successively places in various ways elements which were thought to be immutable and creates a new composition.

Fashion, Horse, Children

The tiny, initial clue ... by allowing us to imagine what we do not know, stimulates a desire for knowledge.

Knowledge, Desire, Tiny

Marcel Proust (2006). “Remembrance of Things Past”, p.236, Wordsworth Editions

Le veritable voyage de decouverte ne consiste pas a chercher de nouveaux paysages, mais a avoir de nouveaux yeux. (The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.)

Real, Eye, Discovery

So long as I know what's boiling in my pot I don't bother my head about what's in other people's.

Long, People, Pot

Marcel Proust (2006). “Remembrance of Things Past”, p.871, Wordsworth Editions

... we made much less happy by the kindness of a great writer, which strictly speaking we find only in his books, than we suffer from the hostility of a woman whom we have not chosen for her intelligence, but whom we cannot stop ourselves from loving.

Love, Happy, Kindness

However, the danger in [socially unbalanced relationships] is that the subjection of the woman temporarily calms the man's jealousy but also renders it more demanding. He ends up making his mistress live like those prisoners on whom light is shone day and night in order for them to be better watched. And things always end in tragedy.

Night, Men, Light

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.

Art, Lying, Passion

Marcel Proust (2000). “In Search of Lost Time, Volume VI: Time Regained (A Modern Library E-Book)”, p.300, Modern Library

An hour or so later he received a note from Odette. Swann had left his cigarette case at her house. "If only," she wrote, "you had also forgotten your heart! I should never have let you have it back.

Heart, House, Forgotten

Marcel Proust (1982). “Remembrance of Things Past: Swann's Way & Within a Budding Grove”, Vintage

We pack the physical outline of the creature we see with all the ideas we have already formed about him, and in the complete picture of him we compose in our minds those ideas have certainly the principal place.

Ideas, Mind, Packs

Marcel Proust (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Marcel Proust (Illustrated)”, p.40, Delphi Classics

Each reader reads only what is already within himself. The book is only a sort of optical instrument which the writer offers to the reader to enable the latter to discover in himself what he would not have found but for the aid of the book.

Book, Aids, Found

Marcel Proust (1932). “Remembrance of Things Past”, New York : Random House

The real stars of society are tired of appearing there. He who is curious to gaze at them must often migrate to another hemisphere, where they are more or less alone.

Stars, Real, Tired

Marcel Proust (2006). “Remembrance of Things Past”, p.64, Wordsworth Editions

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.

Believe, Thinking, Focus

I have a horror of sunsets; they're so romantic, so operatic.

Sunset, Emotion, Horror

'Sodome et Gomorrhe' (Cities of the Plain, 1922, translated by C. K. Scott-Moncrieff, vol. 1, p. 296)

A person does not...stand motionless and clear before our eyes with his merits, his defects, his plans, his intentions with regard to ourself exposed on his surface...but is a shadow which we can never succeed in penetrating...a shadow behind which we can alternately imagine, with equal justification, that there burns the flame of hatred and of love.

Eye, Flames, Hatred

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.

Moving, Book, Philosophical

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.

Octopus, Sound, Our Words

Le Cote de Guermantes (The GuermantesWay) pt. 1 (1921) (translation by C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin)

L'ide e qu'on mourra est plus cruelle que mourir, mais moins que l'ide e qu'un autre est mort. The idea of dying is worse than dying itself, but less cruel than the idea that another has died.

Ideas, Dying, Plus

There is no man ... however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived a life, the memory of which is so unpleasant to him that he would gladly expunge it. And yet he ought not entirely to regret it, because he cannot be certain that he has indeed become a wise man -- so far as it is possible for any of us to be wise -- unless he has passed through all the fatuous or unwholesome incarnations by which that ultimate stage must be preceded.

Wise, Wisdom, Memories

Marcel Proust (2015). “In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower: In Search of Lost Time”, p.481, Yale University Press

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