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Marcel Proust Quotes - Page 14

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At that time, he was satisfying a sensual curiosity by experiencing the pleasures of people who live for love. He had believed he could stop there, that he would not be obliged to learn their sorrows; how small a thing

At that time, he was satisfying a sensual curiosity by experiencing the pleasures of people who live for love. He had believed he could stop there, that he would not be obliged to learn their sorrows; how small a thing her charm was for him now compared with the astounding terror that extended out from it like a murky halo, the immense anguish of not knowing at every moment what she had been doing, of not possessing her everywhere and always!

Knowing, People, Sensual

Marcel Proust (2003). “In Search of Lost Time: The Way by Swann's”, p.369, Penguin UK

When I went to Venice I found that my dream had become-incredibly, but quite simply-my address.

Dream, Venice, Addresses

Everything that seems imperishable tends to extinguishment.

Seems

And so when studying faces, we do indeed measure them, but as painters, not as surveyors.

Faces, Study, Appearance

Marcel Proust (2000). “In Search of Lost Time, Volume II: Within a Budding Grove (A Modern Library E-Book)”, p.621, Modern Library

There is probably not one person, however great his virtue, who cannot be led by the complexities of life's circumstances to a familiarity with the vices he condemns the most vehemently--without his completely recognizing this vice which, disguised as certain events, touches him and wounds him: strange words, an inexplicable attitude, on a given night, of the person whom he otherwise has so many reasons to love.

Attitude, Night, Tolerance

Let but a single flash of reality -- the glimpse of a woman from afar or from behind -- enable us to project the image of Beauty before our eyes, and we imagine that we have recognised it, our hearts beat, and we will always remain half-persuaded that it was She, provided that the woman has vanished: it is only if we manage to overtake her that we realise our mistake.

Mistake, Heart, Eye

Marcel Proust, Charles Kenneth Scott-Moncrieff, Terence Kilmartin, Dennis Joseph Enright (1996). “In Search of Lost Time: Within a budding grove”, Vintage Classics

Indeed, among the lesser auxiliaries to success in love, an absence, the declining of an invitation to dinner, an unintentional, unconscious harshness are of more service than all the cosmetics and fine clothes in the world.

Fashion, Clothes, World

Marcel Proust (2016). “The Guermantes Way”, p.461, Marcel Proust

Now the same mystery which often veils from our eyes the reason for a catastrophe envelops just as frequently, when love is in question, the suddenness of certain happy solutions, such as had been brought to me by Gilberte's letter. Happy, or at least seemingly happy, for there are few that can really be happy when we are dealing with a sentiment of such a kind that any satisfaction we can give it does no more, as a rule, than dislodge some pain. And yet sometimes a respite is granted us, and we have for a little while the illusion of being healed.

Pain, Eye, Love Is

Marcel Proust (1981). “Remembrance of Things Past: Swann's way. Within a budding grove”, New York : Random House

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.

Clever, Being In Love, Men

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

I find very reasonable the Celtic belief that the souls of our dearly departed are trapped in some inferior being, in an animal, aplant, an inanimate object, indeed lost to us until the day, which for some never arrives, when we find that we pass near the tree, or come to possess the object which is their prison. Then they quiver, call us, and as soon as we have recognized them, the spell is broken. Freed by us, they have vanquished death and return to live with us.

Death, Animal, Broken

To a great extent, suffering is a sort of need felt by the organism to make itself familiar with a new state, which makes it uneasy, to adapt its sensibility to that state.

Suffering, Needs, States

Marcel Proust (2006). “Remembrance of Things Past”, p.1127, Wordsworth Editions

L'adolescence est le seul temps o u' l'on ait appris quelque chose. Adolescence is the only time when we can learn something.

Adolescence, Only Time

Physical love, so unjustly decried, forces everyone to manifest even the smallest bits of kindness he possesses, of selflessness,that they shine in the eyes of all who surround him.

Sex, Kindness, Eye

The soldier is convinced that a certain indefinitely extendable time period is accorded him before he is killed, the burglar before he is caught, men in general, before they must die. That is the amulet which preserves individuals — and sometimes populations — not from danger, but from the fear of danger, in reality from the belief in danger, which in some cases allows them to brave it without being brave. Such a confidence, just as unfounded, supports the lover who counts on a reconciliation, a letter.

Reality, Men, Support

None of us constitutes a material whole, identical for everyone, which a person has only to go look up as though we were a book of specifications or a last testament; our social personality is a creation of the minds of others. Even the very simple act that we call "seeing a person we know" is in part an intellectual one. We fill the physical appearance of the individual we see with all the notions we have about him, and of the total picture that we form for ourselves, these notions certainly occupy the greater part.

Book, Simple, Personality

We shall see later on that the diversity of the forms of death that circulate invisibly is the cause of the peculiar unexpectedness of obituary notices in the newspapers.

Death, Diversity, Peculiar

Marcel Proust (2000). “In Search of Lost Time, Volume IV: Sodom and Gomorrah (A Modern Library E-Book)”, p.327, Modern Library

Similarly the men who produce works of genius are not those who live in the most delicate atmosphere, whose conversation is most brilliant, or their culture broadest, but those who have had the power, ceasing in a moment to live only for themselves, to make use of their personality as of a mirror.

Character, Men, Mirrors

Marcel Proust (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Marcel Proust (Illustrated)”, p.884, Delphi Classics

There can be no peace of mind in love, since the advantage one has secured is never anything but a fresh starting-point for future desires.

Love, Mind, Desire

Marcel Proust (2018). “Within a Budding Grove”, p.185, Youcanprint

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

Pain, People, Imagine

Marcel Proust (2003). “The Guermantes way”, ePenguin

Habit! that skillful but slow arranger, which starts out by letting our spirit suffer for weeks in a temporary state, but that thespirit is after all happy to discover, for without habit and reduced to its own resources, the spirit would be unable to make any lodgings seem habitable.

Suffering, Would Be, Spirit

There was nothing abnormal about it when homosexuality was the norm.

Abnormal, Homosexuality, Normal And Abnormal

1921A' la recherche du temps perdu,'Sodome et Gomorrhe'.

For a long time I would go to bed early. [Fr., Longtemps, je me suis couche de bonne heure.]

Book, Long, Bed

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

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.

Disappointment, Garden, Self

Marcel Proust (2000). “In Search of Lost Time, Volume III: The Guermantes Way”, p.112, Modern Library

On devient moral de' s qu'on est malheureux. We become moral once we are miserable.

Moral, Miserable

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.

Book, Childhood, Pleasure

Marcel Proust (1948). “Marcel Proust: A Selection from His Miscellaneous Writings”

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