Marcel Proust Quotes About Virtue

Quotes about: Virtue

• Life is extraordinarily suave and sweet with certain natural, witty, affectionate people who have unusual distinction and are capable of every vice, but who make a display of none in public and about whom no one can affirm they have a single one. There is something supple and secret about them. Besides, their perversity gives spice to their most innocent occupations, such as taking a walk in the garden at night.

  Marcel Proust

  Witty, Sweet, Night

  Marcel Proust (1957). “Pleasures and days: and other writings”

• There is probably no one, however rigid his virtue, who is not liable to find himself, by the complexity of circumstances, living at close quarters with the very vice which he himself has been most outspoken in condemning -- without altogether recognizing it beneath the disguise of ambiguous behavior which it assumes in his presence.

  Marcel Proust

  Vices, Assuming, Virtue

  Marcel Proust, Dennis Joseph Enright (1992). “In Search of Lost Time: Swann's way”, Vintage

• Our virtues themselves are not free and floating qualities over which we retain a permanent control and power of disposal; they come to be so closely linked in our minds with the actions in conjunction with which we have made it our duty to exercise them that if we come to engage in an activity of a different kind, it catches us off guard and without the slightest awareness that it might involve the application of those same virtues.

  Marcel Proust

  Exercise, Mind, Quality

  Marcel Proust (2010). “In Search Of Lost Time, Vol 2: Within a Budding Grove”, p.2, Random House

• There is probably not one person, however great his virtue, who cannot be led by the complexities of life's circumstances to a familiarity with the vices he condemns the most vehemently--without his completely recognizing this vice which, disguised as certain events, touches him and wounds him: strange words, an inexplicable attitude, on a given night, of the person whom he otherwise has so many reasons to love.

  Marcel Proust

  Attitude, Night, Tolerance

• We exist only by virtue of what we possess, we possess only what is really present to us, and many of our memories, our moods, our ideas sail away on a voyage of their own until they are lost to sight! Then we can no longer take them into account in the total which is our personality. But they know of secret paths by which to return to us.

  Marcel Proust

  Memories, Sight, Ideas

  Marcel Proust (1982). “Remembrance of Things Past: The captive. The fugitive. Time regained”, Vintage

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