Marcel Proust Quotes About Books

Quotes about: Books

• 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”

• 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

• Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself. The writer's work is only a kind of optical instrument he provides the reader so he can discern what he might never have seen in himself without this book. The reader's recognition in himself of what the book says is the proof of the book's truth.

  Marcel Proust

  Book, Might, Recognition

• To write that essential book, a great writer does not need to invent it but merely to translate it, since it already exists in each one of us. The duty and task of a writer are those of translator.

  Marcel Proust

  Book, Writing, Humility

• Our passions shape our books, repose writes them in the intervals.

  Marcel Proust

  Book, Passion, Writing

  Marcel Proust (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Marcel Proust (Illustrated)”, p.4867, Delphi Classics

• These dreams reminded me that, since I wished some day to become a writer, it was high time to decide what sort of books I was going to write. But as soon as I asked myself the question, and tried to discover some subject to which I could impart a philosophical significance of infinite value, my mind would stop like a clock, my consciousness would be faced with a blank, I would feel either that I was wholly devoid of talent or perhaps that some malady of the brain was hindering its development.

  Marcel Proust

  Dream, Book, Philosophical

  Marcel Proust (2000). “In Search of Lost Time, Volume I: Swann's Way (A Modern Library E-Book)”, p.251, Modern Library

• Even in the most insignificant details of our daily life, none of us can be said to constitute a material whole, which is identical for everyone, and need only be turned up like a page in an account-book or the record of a will; our social personality is created by the thoughts of other people.

  Marcel Proust

  Book, People, Personality

  Marcel Proust (2008). “The Senses of Consciousness: Swann's Way in Half”, p.15, Lulu.com

• In the sort of screen dappled with different states of mind which my consciousness would simultaneously unfold while I read, and which ranged from the aspirations hidden deepest within me to the completely exterior vision of the horizon which I had, at the bottom of the garden, before my eyes, what was first in me, innermost, the constantly moving handle that controlled the rest, was my belief in the philosophical richness and beauty of the book I was reading, and my desire to appropriate them for myself, whatever that book might be.

  Marcel Proust

  Moving, Book, Philosophical

• 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.

  Marcel Proust

  Real, Book, Heart

• This dim coolness of my room was to the broad daylight of the street what the shadow is to the sunbeam, that is to say equally luminous, and presented to my imagination the entire panorama of summer, which my senses, if I had been out walking, could have tasted and enjoyed only piecemeal; and so it was quite in harmony with my state of repose which (thanks to the enlivening adventures related in my books) sustained, like a hand reposing motionless in a stream of running water, the shock and animation of a torrent of activity.

  Marcel Proust

  Summer, Running, Book

  Marcel Proust (2000). “In Search of Lost Time, Volume I: Swann's Way (A Modern Library E-Book)”, p.131, Modern Library

• None of us constitutes a material whole, identical for everyone, which a person has only to go look up as though we were a book of specifications or a last testament; our social personality is a creation of the minds of others. Even the very simple act that we call "seeing a person we know" is in part an intellectual one. We fill the physical appearance of the individual we see with all the notions we have about him, and of the total picture that we form for ourselves, these notions certainly occupy the greater part.

  Marcel Proust

  Book, Simple, Personality

• Beautiful books are always written in a sort of foreign language.

  Marcel Proust

  Beautiful, Book, Language

• 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”

• For a long time I would go to bed early.
  [Fr., Longtemps, je me suis couche de bonne heure.]

  Marcel Proust

  Book, Long, Bed

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

• Each reader reads only what is already within himself. The book is only a sort of optical instrument which the writer offers to the reader to enable the latter to discover in himself what he would not have found but for the aid of the book.

  Marcel Proust

  Book, Aids, Found

  Marcel Proust (1932). “Remembrance of Things Past”, New York : Random House

• ... we made much less happy by the kindness of a great writer, which strictly speaking we find only in his books, than we suffer from the hostility of a woman whom we have not chosen for her intelligence, but whom we cannot stop ourselves from loving.

  Marcel Proust

  Love, Happy, Kindness

• No days, perhaps, of all our childhood are ever so fully lived as those that we had regarded as not being lived at all: days spent wholly with a favourite book. Everything that seemed to fill them full for others we pushed aside, because it stood between us and the pleasures of the Gods.

  Marcel Proust

  Book, Childhood, Pleasure

  Marcel Proust (1948). “Marcel Proust: A Selection from His Miscellaneous Writings”

• I blame the newspapers because every day they call our attention to insignificant things, while three or four times in our lives,we read books that contain essential things. Once we feverishly tear the band of paper enclosing our newspapers, things should change and we should find--I do not know--the Pensées by Pascal!

  Marcel Proust

  Book, Knowledge, Insignificant Things

• They like my books better in England than in France; a translation would be very successful there.

  Marcel Proust

  Book, Reading, Successful

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

• Pour e crire ce livre essentiel, le seul livre vrai, un grand e crivain n'a pas, dans le sens courant, a' l'inventer puisqu'il existe de j a' en chacun de nous, mais a' le traduire. To write the essential book, the only true book, a great writerdoesnot needto invent becausethebook already exists inside each one of us and merely needs translation.

  Marcel Proust

  Book, Writing, Essentials

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