Marcel Proust Quotes - Page 8

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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

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... in love, barriers cannot be destroyed from the outside by the one to whom the cause despair, no matter what he does; and it isonly when he is no longer concerned with them that, suddenly, as a result of work coming from elsewhere, accomplished within the one who did not love him, these barriers, formerly attacked without success, fall futilely.

Marcel Proust

Love, Fall, Despair

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The moments of the past do not remain still; they retain in our memory the motion which drew them towards the future, towards a future which has itself become the past, and draw us on in their train.

Marcel Proust

Memories, Past, Moments

Marcel Proust (2015). “Remembrance of Things Past: The Sweet Cheat Gone”, p.64, Marcel Proust

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We passionately long that there may be another life in which we shall be similar to what we are here below. But we do not pause to reflect that, even without waiting for that other life, in this life, after a few years we are unfaithful to what we have been, to what we wished to remain immortally.

Marcel Proust

Years, Long, Waiting

Marcel Proust (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Marcel Proust (Illustrated)”, p.2893, Delphi Classics

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Our words are, as a general rule, filled by the people to whom we address them with a meaning which those people derive from their own substance, a meaning widely different from that which we had put into the same words when we uttered them.

Marcel Proust

People, Different, Our Words

Marcel Proust, Charles Kenneth Scott-Moncrieff, Terence Kilmartin, Dennis Joseph Enright (1996). “In Search of Lost Time: Within a budding grove”, Vintage Classics

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It is not only by dint of lying to others, but also of lying to ourselves, that we cease to notice that we are lying.

Marcel Proust

Lying, Cease

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

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...a writer's works, like the water in an artesian well, mount to a height which is in proportion to the depth to which suffering has penetrated his soul.

Marcel Proust

Water, Soul, Suffering

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Laissons les jolies femmes aux hommes sans imagination. Leave the pretty women for the men without imagination.

Marcel Proust

Men, Imagination, Pretty Woman

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

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Every kiss provokes another. Oh, in those earliest days of love how naturally the kisses spring to life! So closely, in their profusion, do they crowd together that lovers would find it as hard to count the kisses exchanged in an hour as to count the flowers in a meadow in May.

Marcel Proust

Spring, Flower, Kissing

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We can sometimes find a person again, but we cannot abolish time. And so on until the unforeseen day, gloomy as a winter night, when one no longer seeks that girl, or any other, when to find her would actually scare one. For one no longer feels that one has attractions enough to please, or strength enough to love. Not, of course, that one is in the strict sense of the word impotent. And as for loving, one would love more than ever. But one feels that it is too big an undertaking for the little strength one has left.

Marcel Proust

Girl, Winter, Night

Marcel Proust (2000). “In Search of Lost Time, Volume IV: Sodom and Gomorrah (A Modern Library E-Book)”, p.348, Modern Library

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The duty and the task of a writer are those of an interpreter.

Marcel Proust

Tasks, Duty, Interpreter

Marcel Proust (2016). “In Search of Lost Time: Or “Á la Recherche du temps perdu””, p.2669, Jester House Publishing

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May you always see a blue sky overhead, my young friend; and then, even when the time comes, as it has come for me now, when the woods are black, when night is fast falling, you will be able to console yourself, as I do, by looking up at the sky.

Marcel Proust

Fall, Night, Young Friends

Marcel Proust (2015). “Swann's Way”, p.130, Vintage

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When we have passed a certain age, the soul of the child we were and the souls of the dead from whom we have sprung come to lavish on us their riches and their spells.

Marcel Proust

Children, Soul, Age

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For, just as in the beginning it is formed by desire, so afterwards love is kept in existence only by painful anxiety.

Marcel Proust

Love Is, Anxiety, Desire

Marcel Proust (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Marcel Proust (Illustrated)”, p.3648, Delphi Classics

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

Marcel Proust

Beautiful, Book, Language

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The past not merely is not fugitive, it remains present.

Marcel Proust

Past, Fugitive, Remains

Marcel Proust (2016). “In Search of Lost Time: Or “Á la Recherche du temps perdu””, p.1278, Jester House Publishing

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We are ordinarily so indifferent to people that when we have invested one of them with the possibility of giving us joy, or suffering, it seems as if he must belong to some other universe, he is imbued with poetry.

Marcel Proust

Love, People, Giving

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There is in this world in which everything wears out, everything perishes, one thing that crumbles into dust, that destroys itself still more completely, leaving behind still fewer traces of itself than Beauty: namely Grief.

Marcel Proust

Grief, Dust, Leaving

Marcel Proust (2016). “In Search of Lost Time: Or “Á la Recherche du temps perdu””, p.2508, Jester House Publishing

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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

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She was "a woman of uncertain age.

Marcel Proust

Age, Uncertain

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Existence is of little interest save on days when the dust of realities is mingled with magic sand.

Marcel Proust

Reality, Dust, Magic

Marcel Proust (2000). “In Search of Lost Time, Volume II: Within a Budding Grove (A Modern Library E-Book)”, p.526, Modern Library

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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

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Masterpieces are no more than the shipwrecked flotsam of great minds.

Marcel Proust

Mind, Great Minds, Flotsam

Marcel Proust (1958). “By Way of Sainte-Beuve: (Contre Sainte-Beuve)”

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The artist who gives up an hour of work for an hour of conversation with a friend knows that he is sacrificing a reality for something that does not exist (our friends being friends only in the light of an agreeable folly which travels with us through life and to which we readily accommodate ourselves, but which at the bottom of our hearts we know to be no more reasonable than the delusion of the man who talks to the furniture because he believes that it is alive.).

Marcel Proust

Giving Up, Believe, Heart

Marcel Proust (1970). “The past recaptured”, Random House (NY)

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

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