Authors:

A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
X
Y
Z

Marcel Proust Quotes - Page 4

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

The most familiar precepts are not always the truest.

The most familiar precepts are not always the truest.

Truth, Familiar, Truest

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

How paradoxical it is to search reality for the pictures that are stored in one's memory.

Memories, Reality, Paradoxical

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

Reading, Reality, 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.

Time, Lying, Literature

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

But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.

Past, Essence, Smell

Marcel Proust (2015). “Swann's Way”, p.50, Vintage

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

Youth, Sin

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

Things don't change, but by and by our wishes change.

Friendship, Change, Perspective

A photograph acquires something of the dignity which it ordinarily lacks when it ceases to be a reproduction of reality and shows us things that no longer exist.

Photography, Reality, Dignity

Marcel Proust (2006). “Remembrance of Things Past”, p.693, Wordsworth Editions

Love is not vain because it is frustrated, but because it is fulfilled. The people we love turn to ashes when we posess them.

Love Is, People, Frustrated

There comes in all our lives a time ... when the ears can listen to no music save what the moonlight breathes through the flute of silence.

Silence, Ears, Flutes

Marcel Proust (2015). “Swann's Way”, p.138, Vintage

As long as men are free to ask what they must, free to say what they think, free to think what they will, freedom can never be lost and science can never regress.

Freedom, Science, Men

"J. Robert Oppenheimer" by L. Barnett, in Life, Vol. 7, No. 9 (p. 58), October 24, 1949.

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.

Depression, Art, Thinking

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.

Space, Optical Illusions, Illusion

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

Love is a reciprocal torture.

Love, Literature, Torture

Death is in truth an illness from which we recover

Illness

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

And wasn't my mind also like another crib in the depths of which I felt I remained ensconced, even in order to watch what was happening outside? When I saw an external object, my awareness that I was seeing it would remain between me and it, lining it with a thin spiritual border that prevented me from ever directly touching its substance; it would volatize in some way before I could make contact with it, just as an incandescent body brought near a wet object never touches its moisture because it is always preceded by a zone of evaporation.

Spiritual, Order, Touching

Marcel Proust (2003). “Swann's Way”, Viking Press

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

Beauty, Loss, 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.

Thinking, People, Unhappy

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.

Giving Up, Sacrifice, Reality

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.

Eye, Sides, Opinion

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.

Moments, Unsatisfied

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.

Views, Judging, Imperfection

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

Wisdom cannot be imparted. Wisdom that a wise man attempts to impart always sounds like foolishness to someone else ... Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, live it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it.” - Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha "We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us from.

Wise, Journey, Men

The heart changes...but we learn of it only from reading or by imagination; for in reality its alteration, like that of certain natural phenomena, is so gradual that, even if we are able to distinguish, successively, each of its different states, we are still spared the actual sensation of change.

Reading, Heart, Reality

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

Happiness, Laughter, Joy

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

You May Also Like: