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Marcel Proust Quotes - Page 4

The most familiar precepts are not always the truest.

The most familiar precepts are not always the truest.

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

In reality, every reader is, while reading, the reader of his own self.

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

Time passes, and little by little everything that we have spoken in falsehood becomes true.

Marcel Proust (1982). “Remembrance of Things Past: The captive. The fugitive. Time regained”, Vintage

For every sin there is forgiveness, and especially for the sins of youth.

Marcel Proust (2006). “Remembrance of Things Past”, p.442, Wordsworth Editions

Everything we think of as great has come to us from neurotics. It is they and they alone who found religions and create great works of art. The world will never realize how much it owes to them and what they have suffered in order to bestow their gifts on it.

Le Cote de Guermantes (The GuermantesWay) pt. 1 (1921). George Seldes, The Great Thoughts, quotes Ramon Guthrie: "This passage was meant to show what fools people who are capable of uttering such idiocies are... . It is slap-stick irony that Proust puts into the mouth of a fool (Boulbon) in order to show what a fool he was."

There are optical illusions in time as well as space.

Marcel Proust (2003). “The prisoner and the fugitive”, ePenguin

Death is in truth an illness from which we recover

Marcel Proust, Christopher Prendergast (2002). “In Search of Lost Time: Sodom and Gomorrah”

The loss of a sense adds as much beauty to the world as its acquisition.

Marcel Proust (2016). “In Search of Lost Time: Or “Á la Recherche du temps perdu””, p.965, Jester House Publishing

People don't know when they are happy. They're never so unhappy as they think they are.

Marcel Proust (2006). “Remembrance of Things Past”, p.339, Wordsworth Editions

The artist who gives up an hour of work for an hour of conversation with a friend knows that he is sacrificing a reality for something that does not exist.

Marcel Proust (2000). “In Search of Lost Time, Volume VI: Time Regained (A Modern Library E-Book)”, p.268, Modern Library

The courage of one's opinions is always a form of calculating cowardice in the eyes of the "other side.

Marcel Proust (2016). “In Search of Lost Time: Or “Á la Recherche du temps perdu””, p.257, Jester House Publishing

Love...., ever unsatisfied, lives always in the moment that is about to come.

Marcel Proust (2015). “Within A Budding Grove”, p.577, Booklassic

The bonds that unite us to another human being are sanctified when he or she adopts the same point of view as ourselves in judging one of our imperfections.

Marcel Proust (2000). “In Search of Lost Time, Volume II: Within a Budding Grove (A Modern Library E-Book)”, p.55, Modern Library

Happiness serves hardly any other purpose than to make unhappiness possible.

Marcel Proust (2006). “Remembrance of Things Past”, p.1178, Wordsworth Editions