Top 25 Quotes by Marcel Proust of 429 - Page 13

A man who falls straight into bed night after night, and ceases to live until the moment when he wakes and rises, will surely never dream of making, I don't say great discoveries, but even minor observations about

A man who falls straight into bed night after night, and ceases to live until the moment when he wakes and rises, will surely never dream of making, I don't say great discoveries, but even minor observations about sleep. He scarcely knows that he is asleep. A little insomnia is not without its value in making us appreciate sleep, in throwing a ray of light upon that darkness.

Marcel Proust

Dream, Fall, Sleep

Marcel Proust (2000). “In Search of Lost Time, Volume IV: Sodom and Gomorrah (A Modern Library E-Book)”, p.69, Modern Library

A sort of egotistical self-evaluation is unavoidable in those joys in which erudition and art mingle and in which aesthetic pleasure may become more acute, but not remain as pure.

Marcel Proust

Art, Self, Joy

Marcel Proust's preface (1910) to John Ruskin "The Bible of Amiens" translated by Marcel Proust (1904); later quoted in "Marcel Proust: On Reading Ruskin" translated by Jean Autret and Philip J. Wolfe (p. 53), 1987.

Having a body is in itself the greatest threat to the mind... The body encloses the mind in a fortress; before long the mind is besieged on all sides, and in the end the mind has to give itself up.

Marcel Proust

Long, Giving, Mind

Marcel Proust (2003). “In Search of Lost Time: Finding Time Again”, ePenguin

A work should convey its entire meaning by itself, imposing it on the spectator even before he knows what the subject is.

Marcel Proust

Art, Philosophy, History

What we have not had to decipher, to elucidate by our own efforts, what was clear before we looked at it, is not ours. From ourselves comes only that which we drag forth from the obscurity which lies within us, that which to others is unknown.

Marcel Proust

Lying, Effort, Obscurity

Marcel Proust (2000). “In Search of Lost Time, Volume VI: Time Regained (A Modern Library E-Book)”, p.276, Modern Library

As soon as he ceased to be mad he became merely stupid. There are maladies we must not seek to cure because they alone protect us from others that are more serious.

Marcel Proust

Stupid, Mad, Disease

Marcel Proust (2016). “In Search of Lost Time: Or “Á la Recherche du temps perdu””, p.1162, Jester House Publishing

A collection of bad love songs, tattered from overuse, has to touch us like a cemetery or a village. So what if the houses have no style, if the graves are vanishing under tasteless ornaments and inscriptions? Before an imagination sympathetic and respectful enough to conceal momentarily its aesthetic disdain, that dust may release a flock of souls, their beaks holding the still verdant dreams that gave them an inkling of the next world and let them rejoice or weep in this world.

Marcel Proust

Dream, Song, Dust

Marcel Proust, Joachim Neugroschel, Roger Shattuck (2003). “The Complete Short Stories of Marcel Proust”, p.127, Rowman & Littlefield

Human altruism which is not egoism, is sterile.

Marcel Proust

Egoism, Humanitarianism, Humans

Marcel Proust (2015). “Remembrance of Things Past Time Regained”, p.274, Marcel Proust

A cathedral, a wave of a storm, a dancer's leap, never turn out to be as high as we had hoped.

Marcel Proust

Motivational, Dance, Dancing

Marcel Proust (1948). “The Maxims of Marcel Proust. Ed. with a Translation by Justin O'Brien”

The fact of the matter is that, since we are determined always to keep our feelings to ourselves, we have never given any thought to the manner in which we should express them. And suddenly there is within us a strange and obscene animal making itself heard, whose tones may inspire as much alarm in the person who receives the involuntary, elliptical and almost irresistible communication of one's defect or vice as would the sudden avowal indirectly and outlandishly proffered by a criminal who can no longer refrain from confessing to a murder of which one had never imagined him to be guilty.

Marcel Proust

Communication, Animal, Inspire

Marcel Proust (2000). “In Search of Lost Time, Volume III: The Guermantes Way”, p.257, Modern Library

Less disappointing than life, great works of art do not begin by giving us all their best.

Marcel Proust

Life, Art, Disappointment

Marcel Proust (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Marcel Proust (Illustrated)”, p.863, Delphi Classics

Most of our faculties lie dormant because they can rely upon Habit, which knows what there is to be done and has no need of their services.

Marcel Proust

Lying, Rely Upon, Needs

Marcel Proust (2006). “Remembrance of Things Past”, p.600, Wordsworth Editions

It is the wicked deception of love that it begins by making us dwell not upon a woman in the outside world but upon a doll inside our head, the only woman who is always available in fact, the only one we shall ever possess, whom the arbitrary nature of memory, almost as absolute as that of the imagination, may have made as different from the real woman as the real Balbec had been from the Balbec I imagined- a dummy creation that little by little, to our own detriment, we shall force the real woman to resemble.

Marcel Proust

Memories, Real, Imagination

Marcel Proust, Christopher Prendergast (2004). “The Guermantes Way”, Viking Press

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

Teamwork, Literature, World

Marcel Proust (2006). “Remembrance of Things Past”, p.837, Wordsworth Editions

The most powerful soporific is sleep itself.

Marcel Proust

Powerful, Sleep, Most Powerful

Marcel Proust (2006). “Remembrance of Things Past”, p.326, Wordsworth Editions

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

Different, Literature, Opinion

Marcel Proust (1957). “Pleasures and days: and other writings”

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.

Marcel Proust

Yesterday, Giving, House

Marcel Proust “Swann’s Way”, W. W. Norton & Company

The great quality of true art is that it rediscovers, grasps and reveals to us that reality far from where we live, from which we get farther and farther away as the conventional knowledge we substitute for it becomes thicker and more impermeable.

Marcel Proust

Art, Reality, Quality

Marcel Proust (1948). “The Maxims of Marcel Proust”

I shall not find a painting more beautiful because the artist has painted a hawthorn in the foreground, though I know of nothing more beautiful than the hawthorn, for I wish to remain sincere and because I know that the beauty of a painting does not depend on the things represented in it. I shall not collect images of hawthorn. I do not venerate hawthorn, I go to see and smell it.

Marcel Proust

Beautiful, Artist, Smell

Marcel Proust's preface (1910) to John Ruskin "The Bible of Amiens" translated by Marcel Proust (1904); later quoted in "Marcel Proust: On Reading Ruskin" translated by Jean Autret and Philip J. Wolfe (p. 57), 1987.

I had long since given up trying to extract from a woman as it were the square root of her unknown quantity, the mystery of which a mere introduction was generally enough to dispel.

Marcel Proust

Women, Squares, Roots

Marcel Proust (2000). “In Search of Lost Time, Volume IV: Sodom and Gomorrah (A Modern Library E-Book)”, p.193, Modern Library

Certainly, it is more reasonable to devote one's life to women than to postage stamps or old snuff-boxes, even to pictures or statues. But the example of other collections should be a warning to us to diversify, to have not one woman only but several.

Marcel Proust

Women, Example, Warning

Marcel Proust (2000). “In Search of Lost Time, Volume III: The Guermantes Way”, p.449, Modern Library

What artists call posterity is the posterity of the work of art.

Marcel Proust

Art, Work, Posterity

Marcel Proust (2016). “In Search of Lost Time: Or “Á la Recherche du temps perdu””, p.512, Jester House Publishing

Perhaps the pleasure one feels in writing is not the infallible test of the literary value of a page; perhaps it is only a secondary state which is often superadded, but the want of which can have no prejudicial effect on it. Perhaps some of the greatest masterpieces were written while yawning.

Marcel Proust

Writing, Yawning, Want

Marcel Proust (2000). “In Search of Lost Time, Volume II: Within a Budding Grove (A Modern Library E-Book)”, p.460, Modern Library

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

Marcel Proust

Change, Desire, Literature

Marcel Proust (2006). “Remembrance of Things Past”, p.817, Wordsworth Editions

This dim coolness of my room was to the broad daylight of the street what the shadow is to the sunbeam, that is to say equally luminous, and presented to my imagination the entire panorama of summer, which my senses, if I had been out walking, could have tasted and enjoyed only piecemeal; and so it was quite in harmony with my state of repose which (thanks to the enlivening adventures related in my books) sustained, like a hand reposing motionless in a stream of running water, the shock and animation of a torrent of activity.

Marcel Proust

Summer, Running, Book

Marcel Proust (2000). “In Search of Lost Time, Volume I: Swann's Way (A Modern Library E-Book)”, p.131, Modern Library