Marcel Proust Quotes about Reading

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Reading is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.

Reading is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.

Marcel Proust

Communication, Reading, Miracle

Marcel Proust (1971). “On Reading”

There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book.

Marcel Proust

Book, Reading, Unhappy Childhood

Marcel Proust (1971). “On Reading”

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

Marcel Proust

Reading, Reality, Self

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

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.

Marcel Proust

Reading, Heart, Reality

Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.

Marcel Proust

Book, Reading, Kind

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.

Marcel Proust

Memories, Reading, Book

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

A man of letters, merely by reading a phrase, can estimate exactly the literary merit of its author.

Marcel Proust

Reading, Men, Literary Merit

Marcel Proust (2016). “Swann's Way”, p.326, Marcel Proust

Theoretically, we know that the world turns, but in fact we do not notice it, the earth on which we walk does not seem to move andwe live on in peace. This is how it is concerning Time in our lives. And to render its passing perceptible, novelists must... have their readers cross ten, twenty, thirty years in two minutes.

Marcel Proust

Time, Moving, Reading

That abominable and sensual act called reading the newspaper, thanks to which all the misfortunes and cataclysms in the universe over the last twenty-four hours, the battles which cost the lives of fifty-thousand men, the murders, the strikes, the bankruptcies, the fires, the poisonings, the suicides, the divorces, the cruel emotions of statesmen and actors, are transformed for us, who don't even care, into a morning treat, blending in wonderfully, in a particularly exciting and tonic way, with the recommended ingestion of a few sips of cafe au lait.

Marcel Proust

Suicide, Morning, Reading

Reading is at the threshold of spiritual life; it can introduce us to it; it does not constitute it. There are, however, certain cases, certain pathological cases, so to speak, of spiritual depression in which reading can become a sort of curative discipline and assume the task, through repeated stimulation, of continuously reintroducing a lazy mind into the life of the spirit.

Marcel Proust

Spiritual, Reading, Discipline

"On Reading".