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Marcel Proust Quotes - Page 11

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

When a belief vanishes, there survives it -- more and more vigorously so as to cloak the absence of the power, now lost to us, of imparting reality to new things -- a fetishistic attachment to the old things which it

When a belief vanishes, there survives it -- more and more vigorously so as to cloak the absence of the power, now lost to us, of imparting reality to new things -- a fetishistic attachment to the old things which it did once animate, as if it was in them and not in ourselves that the divine spark resided, and as if our present incredulity had a contingent cause -- the death of the gods.

Reality, Attachment, Old Things

Marcel Proust (2000). “In Search of Lost Time, Volume I: Swann's Way (A Modern Library E-Book)”, p.581, Modern Library

At a certain age, we have already been struck by love; it no longer develops alone, according to its own mysteries and fateful laws while our hearts stand by startled and passive. We come to its assistanceRecognizing one of its symptoms, we recall, we bring back to life the others. Since we possess its song engraved in its totality within us, we do not need for a woman to tell us the beginning--filled with admiration inspired by beauty--to find the continuation.

Song, Heart, Law

No doubt very few people understand the purely subjective nature of the phenomenon that we call love, or how it creates, so to speak, a supplementary person, distinct from the person whom the world knows by the same name, a person most of whose constituent elements are derived from ourselves.

Names, People, Doubt

Marcel Proust (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Marcel Proust (Illustrated)”, p.808, Delphi Classics

Habit is, of all the plants of human growth, the one that has the least need of nutritious soil in order to live, and is the first to appear on the most seemingly barren rock.

Rocks, Order, Growth

Marcel Proust (2000). “In Search of Lost Time, Volume III: The Guermantes Way”, p.152, Modern Library

How can we have the courage to wish to live, how can we make a movement to preserve ourselves from death, in a world where love is provoked by a lie and consists solely in the need of having our sufferings appeased by whatever being has made us suffer?

Lying, Love Is, Suffering

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

Imagination, People, Atmosphere

Marcel Proust (2016). “In Search of Lost Time: Or “Á la Recherche du temps perdu””, p.922, Jester House Publishing

That translucent alabaster of our memories.

Memories, Our Memories

Marcel Proust (2010). “In Search Of Lost Time, Vol 5: The Captive & The Fugitive”, p.322, Random House

The truth is that men can have several sorts of pleasure. The true pleasure is the one for which they abandon the other.

Men, Truth Is, Pleasure

Marcel Proust (1982). “Remembrance of Things Past: The Guermantes way. Cities of the plain”, Vintage

I should have been happy: I wasn’t.

Should Have, Should, Should Have Been

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.

Aunt, Two, Suffering

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.

Greatest Fear, Able, Limits

Marcel Proust (1970). “The past recaptured”, Random House (NY)

It is only with the passions of others that we are ever really familiar, and what we come to discover about our own can only be learned from them.

Passion, Familiar

Marcel Proust (2015). “Swann's Way”, p.140, Vintage

We only really know what is new, what suddenly introduces to our sensibility a change of tone which strikes us, that for which habit has not yet substituted its pale fac-similes.

Tone, Introducing, Habit

Aristocracy is a relative thing. And there are plenty of out-of-the-way places where the son of an upholsterer is the arbiter of fashion and reigns over a court like any young Prince of Wales.

Fashion, Son, Aristocracy

Marcel Proust (1982). “Remembrance of Things Past: Swann's way. Within a budding grove”, Vintage

For one cannot change, that is to say become another person, while continuing to acquiesce to the feelings of the person one no longer is.

Feelings, Different, Continuing

"In Search of Lost Time: The Way by Swann's".

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

Sight, Mind, Littles

Marcel Proust (2016). “Swann's Way”, p.60, Marcel Proust

The truth is that every morning war is declared afresh. And the men who wish to continue it are as guilty as the men who began it, more guilty perhaps, for the latter perhaps did not foresee all its horrors.

Morning, War, Men

Le Temps Retrouve (Time Regained) (1926) (translation by C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin)

But when one believes in the reality of things, making them visible by artificial means is not quite the same as feeling that they are close at hand.

Believe, Mean, Reality

Marcel Proust (2000). “In Search of Lost Time, Volume II: Within a Budding Grove (A Modern Library E-Book)”, p.31, Modern Library

In summoning even the wisest of physicians to our aid, it is probably that he is relying upon a scientific "truth", the error of which will become obvious in just a few years' time.

Health, Medicine, Errors

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.

Imagination, Giving, Trying

And indeed when we are no longer in love with women whom we meet after many years, is there not the abyss of death between them and ourselves, just as much as if they were no longer of this world, since the fact that we are no longer in love makes the people that they were or the person that we were then as good as dead?

Years, People, World

Marcel Proust (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Marcel Proust (Illustrated)”, p.4472, Delphi Classics

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.

Life, Wise, Wisdom

Marcel Proust (2006). “Remembrance of Things Past”, p.775, Wordsworth Editions

Error, by force of contrast, enhances the triumph of Truth.

Errors, Triumph, Force

Marcel Proust (2012). “Swann's Way”, p.70, Courier Corporation

This love of ours, in so far as it is a love for one particular creature, is not perhaps a very real thing, since, though associations of pleasant or painful musings can attach it for a time to a woman to the extent of making us believe that it has been inspired by her in a logically necessary way, if on the other hand we detach ourselves deliberately or unconsciously from those associations, this love, as though it were in fact spontaneous and sprang from ourselves alone, will revive in order to bestow itself on another woman.

Love, Real, Believe

Are not the thoughts of the dying often turned towards the practical, painful, obscure, visceral aspect, towards the "seamy side" of death which is, as it happens, the side that death actually presents to them and forces them to feel, and which far more closely resembles a crushing burden, a difficulty in breathing, a destroying thirst, than the abstract idea to which we are accustomed to give the name of Death?

Crush, Death, Breathing

Marcel Proust (2010). “In Search Of Lost Time Vol 1: Swann's Way”, p.96, Random House

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