Her face was plastered with layers of powder and looked…

“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

“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

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

Death is in truth an illness from which we recover

— Marcel Proust

The bonds that unite another person to our self exist only in our mind.

— Marcel Proust

...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

“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

“Art extracted from the most familiar reality does indeed exist and its domain is perhaps the largest of any.”

— Marcel Proust

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

“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

“We betroth ourselves by proxy, and then feel obliged to marry the intermediary.”

— Marcel Proust

“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

Often it is just lack of imagination that keeps a man from suffering very much.

— Marcel Proust

“When we are nice to others, we generally lose all claim to their respect.”

— Marcel Proust

“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