A man of letters, merely by reading a phrase, can estimate exactly the literary merit of its author. — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
In reality, every reader is, while reading, the reader of his own self. — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
“Reading is on the threshold of the spiritual life; it can introduce us to it; it does not constitute it.” — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
“...she judged frivolous reading to be as unhealthy as sweets and pastries...” — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
They like my books better in England than in France; a translation would be very successful there. — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
“Dinner-parties bore us because our imagination is absent, and reading interests us because it is keeping us company.” — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
“There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we believe we left without having lived them,… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
... we made much less happy by the kindness of a great writer, which strictly speaking we find only in his books,… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
“On no days of our childhood did we live so fully perhaps as those we thought we had left behind without living… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
Reading is at the threshold of the spiritual life; it can introduce us to it. It does not constitute it ... There… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
“No days, perhaps, of all our childhood are ever so fully lived are those that we had regarded as not being lived… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
“Who cannot recall, as I can, the reading they did in the holidays, which one would conceal successively in all those hours… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
“We feel very strongly that our own wisdom begins where that of the author leaves off and we could like him to… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
“It may be that I might have inferred from the pages that life teaches us to diminish the value of what we… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
The heart changes...but we learn of it only from reading or by imagination; for in reality its alteration, like that of certain… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
Theoretically, we know that the world turns, but in fact we do not notice it, the earth on which we walk does… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
In the sort of screen dappled with different states of mind which my consciousness would simultaneously unfold while I read, and which… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
That abominable and sensual act called reading the newspaper, thanks to which all the misfortunes and cataclysms in the universe over the… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
Reading is at the threshold of spiritual life; it can introduce us to it; it does not constitute it. There are, however,… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
After a certain age our memories are so intertwined with one another that what we are thinking of, the book we are… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
“As long as reading is for us the instigator whose magic keys have opened the door to those dwelling-places deep within us… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
“As for me, I feel myself living and thinking in a room where everything is the creation and the language of lives… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
“The novelist’s happy discovery was to think of substituting for those opaque sections, impenetrable by the human spirit, their equivalent in immaterial… — 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
