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Marcel Proust Quotes - Page 15

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

We may have revolved every possible idea in our minds, and yet the truth has never occurred to us, and it is from without, when we are least expecting it, that it gives us its cruel stab and wounds us forever.

We may have revolved every possible idea in our minds, and yet the truth has never occurred to us, and it is from without, when we are least expecting it, that it gives us its cruel stab and wounds us forever.

Truth, Ideas, Giving

Marcel Proust (2015). “Cities of the Plain (Sodom and Gomorrah)”, p.550, Booklassic

The truth has no need to be uttered to be made apparent, and ... one may perhaps gather it with more certainty, without waiting for words and without even taking any account of them, from countless outward signs, even from certain invisible phenomena, analogous in the sphere of human character to what atmospheric changes are in the physical world.

Truth, Character, Waiting

Marcel Proust (2000). “In Search of Lost Time, Volume III: The Guermantes Way”, p.80, Modern Library

There is not a woman in the world the possession of whom is as precious as that of the truths which she reveals to us by causing us to suffer.

Truth, Suffering, World

Marcel Proust (2006). “Remembrance of Things Past”, p.854, Wordsworth Editions

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

Lying, Doctors, Neurosis

Le Cote de Guermantes Pt 1

It is desire that engenders belief and if we fail as a rule to take this into account, it is because most of the desires that create beliefs end only with our own life.

Desire, Belief, Failing

"Remembrance of Things Past".

And so it is with our own past. It is a labour in vain to attempt to recapture it: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile. The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) of which we have no inkling. And it depends on chance whether or not we come upon this object before we ourselves must die.

Past, Giving, Effort

Marcel Proust (2010). “In Search Of Lost Time Vol 1: Swann's Way”, p.51, Random House

Which of course is followed by: For those who have Awareness, a hint is quite enough. For the multitudes of heedless mere knowledge is useless. Haji Bektash Veli We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.

Spiritual, Journey, Hints

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.

Pain, Past, Survival

Marcel Proust (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Marcel Proust (Illustrated)”, p.4860, Delphi Classics

There is no idea that does not carry in itself a possible refutation, no word that does not imply its opposite.

Opposites, Ideas, Doe

Marcel Proust (2006). “Remembrance of Things Past”, p.941, Wordsworth Editions

I believe that all true art is classic, but the dictates of the mind rarely permit of its being recognized as such when it first appears.

Art, Believe, Mind

Marcel Proust (1966). “Letters of Marcel Proust”

The opinions which we hold of one another, our relations with friends and kinsfolk are in no sense permanent, save in appearance, but are as eternally fluid as the sea itself.

Sea, Opinion, Appearance

Marcel Proust (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Marcel Proust (Illustrated)”, p.1903, Delphi Classics

Even in the most insignificant details of our daily life, none of us can be said to constitute a material whole, which is identical for everyone, and need only be turned up like a page in an account-book or the record of a will; our social personality is created by the thoughts of other people.

Book, People, Personality

Marcel Proust (2008). “The Senses of Consciousness: Swann's Way in Half”, p.15, Lulu.com

The true paradises are the paradises that we have lost.

Philosophical, Paradise, Lost

Marcel Proust (1970). “Time regained”

It is a mistake to speak of a bad choice in love, since, as soon as a choice exists, it can only be bad.

Love, Relationship, Mistake

We strive all the time to give our life its form, but we do so by copying willy-nilly, like a drawing, the features of the person that we are and not of the person we should like to be.

Drawing, Giving, Identity

Marcel Proust (2000). “In Search of Lost Time, Volume III: The Guermantes Way”, p.236, Modern Library

I drank a second mouthful in which I find nothing more than in the first, then a third which gives me rather less than the second. It is time to stop; the potion is losing its magic.

Giving, Magic, Firsts

Marcel Proust (2006). “Remembrance of Things Past”, p.62, Wordsworth Editions

For often I have wished to see a person again without realising that it was simply because that personal recalled to me a hedge of hawthorns in blossom, and I have been led to believe, and to make someone else believe, in a renewal of affection, by what was no more than an inclination to travel.

Believe, Affection, Renewal

Our virtues themselves are not free and floating qualities over which we retain a permanent control and power of disposal; they come to be so closely linked in our minds with the actions in conjunction with which we have made it our duty to exercise them that if we come to engage in an activity of a different kind, it catches us off guard and without the slightest awareness that it might involve the application of those same virtues.

Exercise, Mind, Quality

Marcel Proust (2010). “In Search Of Lost Time, Vol 2: Within a Budding Grove”, p.2, Random House

Any mental activity is easy if it need not be subjected to reality.

Reality, Needs, Easy

"Sodom and Gomorrah".

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

Novelists, Proust, Century

Marcel Proust (1999). “The captive & the fugitive”

We ought at least, from prudence, never to speak of ourselves, because that is a subject on which we may be sure that other people's views are never in accordance with our own.

Views, People, May

Marcel Proust (2006). “Remembrance of Things Past”, p.674, Wordsworth Editions

Love is an incurable malady like those pathetic states in which rheumatism affords the sufferer a brief respite only to be replaced by epileptiform headaches.

Love, Headache, States

Adultery breathes new life into marriages which have been left for dead.

New Life, Adultery, Breathe

1923 A' la recherche du temps perdu,'La Prisonnie' re'.

Perhaps the immobility of the things that surround us is forced upon them by our conviction that they are themselves, and not anything else, and by the immobility of our conceptions of them.

Conviction, Conception, Surround

Marcel Proust (2006). “Remembrance of Things Past”, p.27, Wordsworth Editions

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.

Orchids, Fire, Glowing

Marcel Proust (2000). “In Search of Lost Time, Volume II: Within a Budding Grove (A Modern Library E-Book)”, p.124, Modern Library

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