Marcel Proust Quotes

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Marcel Proust

Profession : Author

Birth : July 10, 1871

We are able to find everything in our memory, which is like a dispensary or chemical laboratory in which chance steers our hand sometimes to a soothing drug and sometimes to a dangerous poison.

Marcel Proust

If only for the sake of elegance, I try to remain morally pure.

Marcel Proust

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

Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and composed our masterpieces.

Marcel Proust

It is not because other people are dead that our affection for them grows faint, it is because we ourselves are dying.

Marcel Proust

We become moral when we are unhappy.

Marcel Proust

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

Marcel Proust

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

Marcel Proust

The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.

Marcel Proust

People wish to learn to swim and at the same time to keep one foot on the ground.

Marcel Proust

In a separation it is the one who is not really in love who says the more tender things.

Marcel Proust

The bonds that unite another person to our self exist only in our mind.

Marcel Proust

The time at our disposal each day is elastic; the passions we feel dilate it, those that inspire us shrink it, and habit fills it.

Marcel Proust

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

Marcel Proust

Three-quarters of the sicknesses of intelligent people come from their intelligence. They need at least a doctor who can understand this sickness.

Marcel Proust

People can have many different kinds of pleasure. The real one is that for which they will forsake the others.

Marcel Proust

Like everybody who is not in love, he thought one chose the person to be loved after endless deliberations and on the basis of particular qualities or advantages.

Marcel Proust

All our final decisions are made in a state of mind that is not going to last.

Marcel Proust

Our intonations contain our philosophy of life, what each of us is constantly telling himself about things.

Marcel Proust

Habit is a second nature which prevents us from knowing the first, of which it has neither the cruelties nor the enchantments.

Marcel Proust