Marcel Proust Quotes - Page 10

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Perfume is that last and best reserve of the past, the one which when all out tears have run dry, can make us cry again!

Marcel Proust

Running, Past, Tears

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We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world. The lives that you admire, the attitudes that seem noble to you, have not been shaped by a paterfamilias or a schoolmaster, they have sprung from very different beginnings, having been influenced by evil or commonplace that prevailed round them. They represent a struggle and a victory.

Marcel Proust

Attitude, Struggle, Journey

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The human plagiarism which is most difficult to avoid, for individuals... is the plagiarism of ourselves.

Marcel Proust

Individual, Plagiarism, Difficult

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Photography is the product of complete alienation.

Marcel Proust

Photography, Alienation, Products

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Lies are essential to humanity.

Marcel Proust

Lying, Humanity, Essentials

1925 A' la recherche du temps perdu,'Albertine disparue'.

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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

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Not caring for their lives' is it? Why, what in the world is there that we should care for if it's not our lives, the only gift the Lord never offers us a second time.

Marcel Proust

Caring, World, Care

Marcel Proust (2016). “In Search of Lost Time: Or “Á la Recherche du temps perdu””, p.90, Jester House Publishing

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That abominable and sensual act called reading the newspaper, thanks to which all the misfortunes and cataclysms in the universe over the last twenty-four hours, the battles which cost the lives of fifty-thousand men, the murders, the strikes, the bankruptcies, the fires, the poisonings, the suicides, the divorces, the cruel emotions of statesmen and actors, are transformed for us, who don't even care, into a morning treat, blending in wonderfully, in a particularly exciting and tonic way, with the recommended ingestion of a few sips of cafe au lait.

Marcel Proust

Suicide, Morning, Reading

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When I was small child, all that belonged to conservative society was fashionable, and no republicans were welcome in the smartersalons. People living in such a milieu could imagine that the impossibility of ever inviting an "opportunist", much less a "radical", was a thing that would last forever, like gas lamps and horse-drawn omnibuses. But similar to kaleidoscopes turning from time to time, society successively places in various ways elements which were thought to be immutable and creates a new composition.

Marcel Proust

Fashion, Horse, Children

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We can only be faithful to what we remember, and we remember only what we have known.

Marcel Proust

Faithful, Remember, Being Faithful

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

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The tiny, initial clue ... by allowing us to imagine what we do not know, stimulates a desire for knowledge.

Marcel Proust

Knowledge, Desire, Tiny

Marcel Proust (2006). “Remembrance of Things Past”, p.236, Wordsworth Editions

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Le veritable voyage de decouverte ne consiste pas a chercher de nouveaux paysages, mais a avoir de nouveaux yeux. (The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.)

Marcel Proust

Real, Eye, Discovery

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... 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

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However, the danger in [socially unbalanced relationships] is that the subjection of the woman temporarily calms the man's jealousy but also renders it more demanding. He ends up making his mistress live like those prisoners on whom light is shone day and night in order for them to be better watched. And things always end in tragedy.

Marcel Proust

Night, Men, Light

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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

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An hour or so later he received a note from Odette. Swann had left his cigarette case at her house. "If only," she wrote, "you had also forgotten your heart! I should never have let you have it back.

Marcel Proust

Heart, House, Forgotten

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

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We pack the physical outline of the creature we see with all the ideas we have already formed about him, and in the complete picture of him we compose in our minds those ideas have certainly the principal place.

Marcel Proust

Ideas, Mind, Packs

Marcel Proust (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Marcel Proust (Illustrated)”, p.40, Delphi Classics

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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

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The real stars of society are tired of appearing there. He who is curious to gaze at them must often migrate to another hemisphere, where they are more or less alone.

Marcel Proust

Stars, Real, Tired

Marcel Proust (2006). “Remembrance of Things Past”, p.64, Wordsworth Editions

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To achieve accurate knowledge of others, if such a thing were possible, we could only ever arrive at it through the slow and unsure recognition of our own initial optical inaccuracies. However, such knowledge is not possible: for, while our vision of others is being adjusted, they, who are not made of mere brute matter, are also changing; we think we have managed to see them more clearly, but they shift; and when we believe we have them fully in focus, it is merely our older images of them that we have clarified, but which are themselves already out of date.

Marcel Proust

Believe, Thinking, Focus

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I have a horror of sunsets; they're so romantic, so operatic.

Marcel Proust

Sunset, Emotion, Horror

'Sodome et Gomorrhe' (Cities of the Plain, 1922, translated by C. K. Scott-Moncrieff, vol. 1, p. 296)

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A person does not...stand motionless and clear before our eyes with his merits, his defects, his plans, his intentions with regard to ourself exposed on his surface...but is a shadow which we can never succeed in penetrating...a shadow behind which we can alternately imagine, with equal justification, that there burns the flame of hatred and of love.

Marcel Proust

Eye, Flames, Hatred

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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

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The paradoxes of today are the prejudices of tomorrow, since the most benighted and the most deplorable prejudices have had their moment of novelty when fashion lent them its fragile grace.

Marcel Proust

Fashion, Grace, Prejudice

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

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But to ask pity of our body is like discoursing in front of an octopus, for which our words can have no more meaning than the sound of the tides, and with which we should be appalled to find ourselves condemned to live.

Marcel Proust

Octopus, Sound, Our Words

Le Cote de Guermantes (The GuermantesWay) pt. 1 (1921) (translation by C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin)

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Born: July 10, 1871
Died: November 18, 1922
Occupation: Novelist
Cite this Page: Citation

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