Life Quotes by Marcel Proust

Always try to keep a patch of sky above your life.

— Marcel Proust

Adultery breathes new life into marriages which have been left for dead.

— Marcel Proust

Sometimes in this life, under the stress of an exceptional emotion, people do say what they think.

— Marcel Proust

“breathed into this quite ordinary prose a kind of life, continuous and full of feeling. My”

— Marcel Proust

Even though our lives wander, our memories remain in one place.

— Marcel Proust

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

— Marcel Proust

Less disappointing than life, great works of art do not begin by giving us all their best.

— Marcel Proust

“For every death is for others a simplification of life, it spares them the necessity of showing gratitude, the obligation of paying…

— Marcel Proust

“Our desires interweave with one another; and in the confusion of existence, it is seldom that a joy is promptly paired with…

— Marcel Proust

“True life life at last discovered and illuminated the only life therefore really lived that life is literature.”

— Marcel Proust

“recalling our life in the old days at Combray with my great-aunt, at Balbec, Paris, Doncières, Venice, and the rest;”

— Marcel Proust

Even from the simplest, the most realistic point of view, the countries which we long for occupy, at any given moment, a…

— Marcel Proust

We strive all the time to give our life its form, but we do so by copying willy-nilly, like a drawing, the…

— Marcel Proust

Our desires cut across one another, and in this confused existence it is rare for happiness to coincide with the desire that…

— Marcel Proust

“Reading is on the threshold of the spiritual life; it can introduce us to it; it does not constitute it.”

— Marcel Proust

A man may have spent his life among the great ones of the earth, who to him have been merely boring relatives…

— Marcel Proust

“The truth, even more, is that life is perpetually weaving fresh threads which link one individual and one event to another, and…

— Marcel Proust

“His life and family circle changed considerably between 1900 and 1905. In February 1903, Proust's brother Robert married and left the family…

— Marcel Proust

We construct our lives for one person, and when at length it is ready to receive her that person does not come;…

— Marcel Proust

The reason why life may be judged to be trivial although at certain moments it seems to us so beautiful is that…

— Marcel Proust

I was left alone there in the company of the orchids, roses and violets, which, like people waiting beside you who do…

— Marcel Proust

“The places we have known do not belong only to the world of space on which we map them for our own…

— Marcel Proust

“People who learn some correct detail about another person's life at once draw conclusions from it which are not accurate, and see…

— Marcel Proust

“In a recluse, the most irrevocable, lifelong rejection of the world often has as its basis an uncontrolled passion for the crowd,…

— Marcel Proust

“The reality that I had known no longer existed. The places that we have known belong now only to the little world…

— Marcel Proust

Perhaps it is not-being that is the true state, and all our dream of life is inexistent; but, if so, we feel…

— Marcel Proust

“There is, following an ample meal, a sort of pause in time, filled with a gentle slackening of thought and energy, when…

— Marcel Proust

“Whatever one may say, writing a novel is a very different thing from living one. All the same our lives are not…

— Marcel Proust

“Then from those profound slumbers we awake in a dawn, not knowing who we are, being nobody, newly born, ready for anything,…

— Marcel Proust

“This compulsion to an activity without respite, without variety, without result was so cruel that one day, noticing a swelling over his…

— Marcel Proust

“The idea that one will die is more painful than dying, but less painful than the idea that another person is dead,…

— Marcel Proust

“By shutting her eyes, by losing consciousness, Albertine had stripped off, one after another, the different human personalities with which we had…

— Marcel Proust

“There is no man,’ he began, ‘however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived in…

— Marcel Proust

“But then, even in the most significant details of our daily life, none of us can be said to constitute a material…

— Marcel Proust

“Composers do not remember this lost fatherland, but each of them remains all his life unconsciously attuned to it; he is delirious…

— Marcel Proust

“As for me, I feel myself living and thinking in a room where everything is the creation and the language of lives…

— Marcel Proust

“All those beings who revealed truths to me and who were no longer there, seemed to me to have lived a life…

— Marcel Proust

“We passionately long for there to be another life in which we shall be similar to what we are here below. But…

— Marcel Proust

“The belief that a person has a share in an unknown life to which his or her love may win us admission…

— Marcel Proust

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

— Marcel Proust