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Marcel Proust Quotes - Page 7

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

Our worst fears, like our greatest hopes, are not outside our powers, and we can come in the end to triumph over the former and to achieve the latter.

Our worst fears, like our greatest hopes, are not outside our powers, and we can come in the end to triumph over the former and to achieve the latter.

Triumph, Achieve, Ends

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

After a certain age, the more one becomes oneself, the more obvious one's family traits become.

Age, Certain, Obvious

Sometimes in the afternoon sky the moon would pass white as a cloud, furtive, lusterless, like an actress who does not have to perform yet and who, from the audience, in street clothes, watches the other actors for a moment, making herself inconspicuous, not wanting anyone to pay attention to her.

Moon, White, Clothes

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

The true voyage of discovery is not a journey to a new place; it is learning to see with new eyes.

Eye, Journey, Discovery

A work in which there are theories is like an object which still has the ticket that shows its price.

Tickets, Theory, Shows

Marcel Proust (1970). “The past recaptured”, Random House (NY)

Those whose suffering is due to love are, as we say of certain invalids, their own physicians.

Suffering, Physicians, Certain

Marcel Proust (2006). “Remembrance of Things Past”, p.578, Wordsworth Editions

But sometimes the future is latent in us without our knowing it, and our supposedly lying words foreshadow an imminent reality.

Lying, Reality, Knowing

Marcel Proust (2000). “In Search of Lost Time, Volume IV: Sodom and Gomorrah (A Modern Library E-Book)”, p.54, Modern Library

For women who do not love us, as for the "disappeared", knowing that we no longer have any hope does not prevent us form continuing to wait. We live on our guard, on watch; women whose son has gone asea on a dangerous exploration imagine at any minute, although it has long been certain that he has perished, that he will enter, miraculously saved, and healthy.

Love, Death, Hope

In his younger days a man dreams of possessing the heart of the woman whom he loves; later, the feeling that he possesses the heart of a woman may be enough to make him fall in love with her.

Love, Dream, Fall

Marcel Proust (2016). “Swann's Way”, p.263, Marcel Proust

The places we have known do not belong solely to the world of space in which we situate them for our greater convenience. They were only a thin slice among contiguous impressions which formed our life at that time; the memory of a certain image is but regret for a certain moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fleeting, alas, as the years.

Memories, Regret, Years

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

Everybody calls "clear" those ideas which have the same degree of confusion as his own.

Teaching, Ideas, Confusion

After a certain age our memories are so intertwined with one another that what we are thinking of, the book we are reading, scarcely matters any more. We have put something of ourselves everywhere, everything is fertile, everything is dangerous, and we can make discoveries no less precious than in Pascal's Pensées in an advertisement for soap.

Memories, Reading, Book

Marcel Proust, Charles Kenneth Scott-Moncrieff, Dennis Joseph Enright (1992). “The captive, The fugitive”

...the nose is generally the organ in which stupidity is most readily displayed.

Stupidity, Noses, Organs

Marcel Proust (2006). “Remembrance of Things Past”, p.269, Wordsworth Editions

All the great things we know have come to us from neurotics. It is they who have founded religions and created great works of art.

Art, Great Work, Great Things

A sleeping man holds in a circle around him the thread of the hours, the order of years and of worlds. He consults them instinctively upon awaking and in one second reads in them the point of the earth that he occupies, the time past until his arousal; but their ranks can be mingled or broken.

Time, Sleep, Men

A certain similarity exists, although the type evolves, between all the women we love, a similarity that is due to the fixity of our own temperament, which it is that chooses them, eliminating all those who would not be at once our opposite and our complement, fitted that is to say to gratify our senses and to wring our heart.

Heart, Opposites, Type

Marcel Proust (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Marcel Proust (Illustrated)”, p.1182, Delphi Classics

We feel in one world, we think and name in another. Between the two we can set up a system of references, but we cannot fill in the gap.

Life, Thinking, Names

For although we know that the years pass, that youth gives way to old age, that fortunes and thrones crumble (even the most solid among them) and that fame is transitory, the manner in which—by means of a sort of snapshot—we take cognisance of this moving universe whirled along by Time, has the contrary effect of immobilising it.

Moving, Mean, Years

Marcel Proust (2000). “In Search of Lost Time, Volume VI: Time Regained (A Modern Library E-Book)”, p.402, Modern Library

A powerful idea communicates some of its power to the man who contradicts it. Partaking of the universal community of minds, it infiltrates, grafts itself on to, the mind of him who it refutes, among other contiguous ideas, with the aid of which, counter-attacking, he complements and corrects it; so that the final verdict is always to some extent the work of both parties to a discussion.

Powerful, Party, Men

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

Our words are, as a general rule, filled by the people to whom we address them with a meaning which those people derive from their own substance, a meaning widely different from that which we had put into the same words when we uttered them.

People, Different, Our Words

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

It's odd how a person always arouses admiration for his moral qualities among the relatives of another with whom he has sexual relations. Physical love, so unjustifiably decried, makes everyone show, down to the least detail, all he has of goodness and self-sacrifice, so that he shines even in the eyes of those nearest to him.

Love, Eye, Sacrifice

Memory nourishes the heart, and grief abates.

Sympathy, Memories, Grief

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

To understand a profound thought is to have, at the moment one understands it, a profound thought oneself; and this demands some effort, a genuine descent to the heart of oneself . . . Only desire and love give us the strength to make this effort. The only books that we truly absorb are those we read with real appetite, after having worked hard to get them, so great had been our need of them.

Real, Book, Heart

The moments of the past do not remain still; they retain in our memory the motion which drew them towards the future, towards a future which has itself become the past, and draw us on in their train.

Memories, Past, Moments

Marcel Proust (2015). “Remembrance of Things Past: The Sweet Cheat Gone”, p.64, Marcel Proust

We passionately long that there may be another life in which we shall be similar to what we are here below. But we do not pause to reflect that, even without waiting for that other life, in this life, after a few years we are unfaithful to what we have been, to what we wished to remain immortally.

Years, Long, Waiting

Marcel Proust (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Marcel Proust (Illustrated)”, p.2893, Delphi Classics

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