Marcel Proust Quotes About Habits

Quotes about: Habits

• 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

  Passion, Inspire, Each Day

• The features of our face are hardly more than gestures which force of habit made permanent. Nature, like the destruction of Pompeii, like the metamorphosis of a nymph into a tree, has arrested us in an accustomed movement.

  Marcel Proust

  Nature, Nymphs, Tree

  Marcel Proust (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Marcel Proust (Illustrated)”, p.1194, Delphi Classics

• The fixity of a habit is generally in direct proportion to its absurdity.

  Marcel Proust

  Habit, Proportion, Absurdity

• I cannot express the uneasiness caused in me by this intrusion of mystery and beauty into a room I had at last filled with myself to the point of paying no more attention to the room than to that self. The anesthetizing influence of habit having ceased, I would begin to have thoughts, and feelings, and they are such sad things.

  Marcel Proust

  Self, Feelings, Attention

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

• 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

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

  Marcel Proust

  Knowing, Enchantment, Firsts

  Marcel Proust, Christopher Prendergast (2002). “In Search of Lost Time: Sodom and Gomorrah”

• Most of our faculties lie dormant because they can rely upon Habit, which knows what there is to be done and has no need of their services.

  Marcel Proust

  Lying, Rely Upon, Needs

  Marcel Proust (2006). “Remembrance of Things Past”, p.600, Wordsworth Editions

• Habit! that skilful but slow-moving arranger who begins by letting our minds suffer for weeks on end in temporary quarters, but whom our minds are none the less only too happy to discover at last, for without it, reduced to their own devices, they would be powerless to make any room seem habitable.

  Marcel Proust

  Moving, Mind, Suffering

  Marcel Proust (2015). “Swann's Way”, p.9, Vintage

• Habit is, of all the plants of human growth, the one that has the least need of nutritious soil in order to live, and is the first to appear on the most seemingly barren rock.

  Marcel Proust

  Rocks, Order, Growth

  Marcel Proust (2000). “In Search of Lost Time, Volume III: The Guermantes Way”, p.152, Modern Library

• When one becomes for an instant one's former self, that is to say different from what one has been for some time past, one's sensibility, being no longer dulled by habit, receives from the slightest stimulus vivid impressions which make everything that has preceded them fade into insignificance, impressions to which, because of their intensity, we attach ourselves with the momentary enthusiasm of a drunkard.

  Marcel Proust

  Past, Self, Different

  Marcel Proust (2000). “In Search of Lost Time, Volume IV: Sodom and Gomorrah (A Modern Library E-Book)”, p.537, Modern Library

• Habit! that skillful but slow arranger, which starts out by letting our spirit suffer for weeks in a temporary state, but that thespirit is after all happy to discover, for without habit and reduced to its own resources, the spirit would be unable to make any lodgings seem habitable.

  Marcel Proust

  Suffering, Would Be, Spirit

• We only really know what is new, what suddenly introduces to our sensibility a change of tone which strikes us, that for which habit has not yet substituted its pale fac-similes.

  Marcel Proust

  Tone, Introducing, Habit

• This labour of the artist to discover a means of apprehending beneath matter and experience, beneath words, something different from their appearance, is of an exactly contrary nature to the operation in which pride, passion, intelligence and habit are constantly engaged within us when we spend our lives without self-communion, accumulating as though to hide our true impressions, the terminology for practical ends which we falsely call life.

  Marcel Proust

  Passion, Mean, Pride

  Marcel Proust (1949). “Remembrance of Things Past: Time regained”

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