“The anaesthetic effect of habit being destroyed, I would begin to think - and to feel - such melancholy things.” — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
The fixity of a habit is generally in direct proportion to its absurdity. — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
The time at our disposal each day is elastic; the passions we feel dilate it, those that inspire us shrink it, and… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
“It may, incidentally, be observed that the regularity of a habit is usually in direct proportion to its absurdity.” — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
“And in love, it is easier to relinquish a feeling than to give up a habit.” — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
“Were it not for habit, life would seem delightful to beings constantly under threat of dying, in other words to all humankind.” — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
The features of our face are hardly more than gestures which force of habit made permanent. Nature, like the destruction of Pompeii,… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
The time which we have at our disposal every day is elastic; the passions we feel expand it, those that we inspire… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
“Once we have reached a certain degree of enfeeblement, whether caused by age or by ill health, all pleasure taken at the… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
“The telephone was not yet at that date as commonly in use as it is today. And yet habit requires so short… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
“A man who is in the habit of smiling in the glass at his handsome face and stalwart figure, if you shew… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
“The ‘action’ began: to me it seemed all the more obscure because in those days, when I read to myself, I used… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
Our vanity, our passions, our spirit of imitation, our abstract intelligence, our habits have long been at work, and it is the… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
There is probably no one, however rigid his virtue, who is not liable to find himself, by the complexity of circumstances, living… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
“make use of some such alarm signals as mad-doctors adopt in dealing with their distracted patients; as by beating several times on… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
“She's on the stairs, ma'am, getting her breath,' said the young servant, who had not been long up from the country, where… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
When one becomes for an instant one's former self, that is to say different from what one has been for some time… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
“Lies, so often misleading and which form the substance of all conversations, are less effective in covering up a feeling of dislike… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
“but they knew, either instinctively or from experience, that our impulsive emotions have but little influence over the course of our actions… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
“This malady which Swann’s love had become had so proliferated, was so closely interwoven with all his habits, with all his actions,… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
I cannot express the uneasiness caused in me by this intrusion of mystery and beauty into a room I had at last… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
This labour of the artist to discover a means of apprehending beneath matter and experience, beneath words, something different from their appearance,… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
“machinery' of life at Versailles; and was able, too, to persuade herself that her silence, a shade of good humour or of arrogance on… — Marcel Proust Copy Share
“For her [Françoise], wealth was like a necessary condition without which virtue would lack both merit and charm. She made so little distinction between… — Marcel Proust Copy Share
Knowing does not always allow us to prevent, but at least the things that we know, we hold them, if not in our hands,… — Marcel Proust Copy Share
...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… — Marcel Proust Copy Share
“Then from those profound slumbers we awake in a dawn, not knowing who we are, being nobody, newly born, ready for anything, the brain… — Marcel Proust Copy Share
“Art extracted from the most familiar reality does indeed exist and its domain is perhaps the largest of any.” — Marcel Proust Copy Share
I find very reasonable the Celtic belief that the souls of our dearly departed are trapped in some inferior being, in an animal, aplant,… — Marcel Proust Copy Share
“When you heard anyone in the middle of a talk which was being deliberately kept off the Affair announce furtively some piece of political… — Marcel Proust Copy Share
“We betroth ourselves by proxy, and then feel obliged to marry the intermediary.” — Marcel Proust Copy Share
“But the old lady on the contrary, far from justifying her daughter’s fears, felt every time someone of her own age “disappeared” that she… — Marcel Proust Copy Share
Often it is just lack of imagination that keeps a man from suffering very much. — Marcel Proust Copy Share
“When we are nice to others, we generally lose all claim to their respect.” — Marcel Proust Copy Share
“Nobility is often no more than the inner aspect which our egotistical feelings assume when we have not yet named and classified them.” — Marcel Proust Copy Share
