Marcel Proust Quotes About Pleasure

Quotes about: Pleasure

• Lies are essential to humanity. They are perhaps as important as the pursuit of pleasure and moreover are dictated by that pursuit.

  Marcel Proust

  Life, Success, Lying

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

• She poured out Swann's tea, inquired "Lemon or cream?" and, on his answering "Cream, please," said to him with a laugh: "A cloud!" And as he pronounced it excellent, "You see, I know just how you like it." This tea had indeed seemed to Swann, just as it seemed to her; something precious, and love has such a need to find some justification for itself, some guarantee of duration, in pleasures which without it would have no existence and must cease with its passing.

  Marcel Proust

  Clouds, Laughing, Tea

  Marcel Proust (1982). “Remembrance of Things Past: Swann's Way & Within a Budding Grove”, Vintage

• It has been said that beauty is a promise of happiness. Conversely, the possibility of pleasure can be a beginning of beauty.

  Marcel Proust

  Beauty, Promise, Pleasure

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

• Pleasures are like photographs: in the presence of the person we love, we take only negatives, which we develop later, at home, when we have at our disposal once more our inner dark room, the door of which it is strictly forbidden to open while others are present.

  Marcel Proust

  Home, Dark, Doors

  Marcel Proust (2003). “In the shadow of young girls in flower”, ePenguin

• At that time, he was satisfying a sensual curiosity by experiencing the pleasures of people who live for love. He had believed he could stop there, that he would not be obliged to learn their sorrows; how small a thing her charm was for him now compared with the astounding terror that extended out from it like a murky halo, the immense anguish of not knowing at every moment what she had been doing, of not possessing her everywhere and always!

  Marcel Proust

  Knowing, People, Sensual

  Marcel Proust (2003). “In Search of Lost Time: The Way by Swann's”, p.369, Penguin UK

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

  Marcel Proust

  Real, People, Different

• 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”

• Perhaps the pleasure one feels in writing is not the infallible test of the literary value of a page; perhaps it is only a secondary state which is often superadded, but the want of which can have no prejudicial effect on it. Perhaps some of the greatest masterpieces were written while yawning.

  Marcel Proust

  Writing, Yawning, Want

  Marcel Proust (2000). “In Search of Lost Time, Volume II: Within a Budding Grove (A Modern Library E-Book)”, p.460, Modern Library

• 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.

• The truth is that men can have several sorts of pleasure. The true pleasure is the one for which they abandon the other.

  Marcel Proust

  Men, Truth Is, Pleasure

  Marcel Proust (1982). “Remembrance of Things Past: The Guermantes way. Cities of the plain”, Vintage

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