Marcel Proust Quotes About Art

Quotes about: Art

• 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.

  Marcel Proust

  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."

• Thanks to art, instead of seeing one world only, our own, we see that world multiply itself and we have at our disposal as many worlds as there are original artists, worlds more different one from the other than those which revolve in infinite space, worlds which, centuries after the extinction of the fire from which their light first emanated, whether it is called Rembrandt or Vermeer, send us still each one its special radiance.

  Marcel Proust

  Art, Space, Fire

  Marcel Proust, Joanna Kilmartin (1992). “In Search of Lost Time: Time regained. VI”, Random House (UK)

• Only by art can we get outside ourselves, instead of seeing only one world, our own, we see it under multiple forms.

  Marcel Proust

  Art, World, Form

  Marcel Proust (1932). “Cities of the Plain”

• We think and name in one world, we live and feel in another.

  Marcel Proust

  Art, Philosophy, Thinking

• Through art alone are we able to emerge from ourselves, to know what another person sees of a universe which is not the same as our own and of which, without art, the landscapes would remain as unknown to us as those that may exist on the moon.

  Marcel Proust

  Art, Persons, Knows

  "In Search of Lost Time, Volume VI: Time Regained".

• Thanks to art, instead of seeing one world, our own, we see it multiplied and as many original artists as there are, so many worlds are at our disposal.

  Marcel Proust

  Art, World, Thanks

  Marcel Proust (2015). “Remembrance of Things Past Time Regained”, p.161, Marcel Proust

• Less disappointing than life, great works of art do not begin by giving us all their best.

  Marcel Proust

  Life, Art, Disappointment

  Marcel Proust (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Marcel Proust (Illustrated)”, p.863, Delphi Classics

• For everyone who, having no artistic sense-that is to say, no submission to subjective reality-may have the knack of reasoning about art till doomsday, especially if he be, in addition, a diplomat or financier in contact with the 'realities' of the present day, is only too ready to believe literature is an intellectual game which is destined to gradually be abandoned as time goes on.

  Marcel Proust

  Art, Believe, Reality

• Our vanity, our passions, our spirit of imitation, our abstract intelligence, our habits have long been at work, and it is the task of art to undo this work of theirs, making us travel back in the direction from which we have come to the depths where what has really existed lies unknown within us.

  Marcel Proust

  Art, Lying, Passion

  Marcel Proust (2000). “In Search of Lost Time, Volume VI: Time Regained (A Modern Library E-Book)”, p.300, Modern Library

• The particulars of life do not matter to the artist; they merely provide him with the opportunity to lay bare his genius.

  Marcel Proust

  Art, Opportunity, Genius

  Marcel Proust (2000). “In Search of Lost Time, Volume II: Within a Budding Grove (A Modern Library E-Book)”, p.509, Modern Library

• The great quality of true art is that it rediscovers, grasps and reveals to us that reality far from where we live, from which we get farther and farther away as the conventional knowledge we substitute for it becomes thicker and more impermeable.

  Marcel Proust

  Art, Reality, Quality

  Marcel Proust (1948). “The Maxims of Marcel Proust”

• Only through art can we get outside of ourselves and know another's view of the universe which is not the same as ours and see landscapes which otherwise would remain unknown to us like the landscapes of the moon. Thanks to art, instead of seeing a single world, our own, we see it multiply until we have before us as many worlds as there are original artists.

  Marcel Proust

  Art, Moon, Views

• 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.

  Marcel Proust

  Art, Great Work, Great Things

• What artists call posterity is the posterity of the work of art.

  Marcel Proust

  Art, Work, Posterity

  Marcel Proust (2016). “In Search of Lost Time: Or “Á la Recherche du temps perdu””, p.512, Jester House Publishing

• In times like ours, where the growing complexity of life leaves us barely the time to read the newspapers, where the map of Europehas endured profound rearrangements and is perhaps on the brink of enduring yet others, where so many threatening and new problems appear everywhere, you will admit it may be demanded of a writer that he be more than a fine wit who makes us forget in idle and byzantine discussions on the merits of pure form.

  Marcel Proust

  Art, Profound, Byzantine

• A sort of egotistical self-evaluation is unavoidable in those joys in which erudition and art mingle and in which aesthetic pleasure may become more acute, but not remain as pure.

  Marcel Proust

  Art, Self, Joy

  Marcel Proust's preface (1910) to John Ruskin "The Bible of Amiens" translated by Marcel Proust (1904); later quoted in "Marcel Proust: On Reading Ruskin" translated by Jean Autret and Philip J. Wolfe (p. 53), 1987.

• True variety is in that plenitude of real and unexpected elements, in the branch charged with blue flowers thrusting itself, against all expectations, from the springtime hedge which seems already too full, while the purely formal imitation of varietyis but void and uniformity, that is, that which is most opposed to variety.

  Marcel Proust

  Art, Real, Flower

• A work should convey its entire meaning by itself, imposing it on the spectator even before he knows what the subject is.

  Marcel Proust

  Art, Philosophy, History

• I was not at all worried about finding my doctor boring; I expected from him, thanks to an art of which the laws escaped me, that he pronounce concerning my health an indisputable oracle by consulting my entrails.

  Marcel Proust

  Art, Law, Doctors

• I believe that all true art is classic, but the dictates of the mind rarely permit of its being recognized as such when it first appears.

  Marcel Proust

  Art, Believe, Mind

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

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