Artist Quotes by Marcel Proust

A work should convey its entire meaning by itself, imposing it on the spectator even before he knows what the subject is.

— Marcel Proust

Only by art can we get outside ourselves, instead of seeing only one world, our own, we see it under multiple forms.

— Marcel Proust

Only through art can we emerge from ourselves and know what another person sees.

— Marcel Proust

What artists call posterity is the posterity of the work of art.

— Marcel Proust

The particulars of life do not matter to the artist; they merely provide him with the opportunity to lay bare his genius.

— Marcel Proust

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

— Marcel Proust

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

— Marcel Proust

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

— Marcel Proust

Thanks to art, instead of seeing one world, our own, we see it multiplied and as many original artists as there are,…

— Marcel Proust

Le style, pour l'e crivain aussi bien que pour le peintre, est une question non de technique mais de vision. For the…

— Marcel Proust

The great quality of true art is that it rediscovers, grasps and reveals to us that reality far from where we live,…

— Marcel Proust

Through art alone are we able to emerge from ourselves, to know what another person sees of a universe which is not…

— Marcel Proust

“An artist, however modest, is always willing to hear himself preferred to his rivals, and tries only to see that justice is…

— Marcel Proust

I believe that all true art is classic, but the dictates of the mind rarely permit of its being recognized as such…

— Marcel Proust

“as those old engravings of the ‘Cenacolo,’ or that painting by Gentile Bellini, in which one sees, in a state in which…

— Marcel Proust

The artist who gives up an hour of work for an hour of conversation with a friend knows that he is sacrificing…

— Marcel Proust

True variety is in that plenitude of real and unexpected elements, in the branch charged with blue flowers thrusting itself, against all…

— Marcel Proust

The only true voyage, the only bath in the Fountain of Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess…

— Marcel Proust

“All the products of one period have something in common; the artists who illustrate the poetry of their generation are the same…

— Marcel Proust

The artist who gives up an hour of work for an hour of conversation with a friend knows that he is sacrificing…

— Marcel Proust

This labour of the artist to discover a means of apprehending beneath matter and experience, beneath words, something different from their appearance,…

— Marcel Proust

For everyone who, having no artistic sense-that is to say, no submission to subjective reality-may have the knack of reasoning about art…

— Marcel Proust

I shall not find a painting more beautiful because the artist has painted a hawthorn in the foreground, though I know of…

— Marcel Proust

In times like ours, where the growing complexity of life leaves us barely the time to read the newspapers, where the map…

— Marcel Proust

“While Elstir, at my request, went on painting, I wandered about in the half-light, stopping to examine first one picture, then another.…

— Marcel Proust

“Nor did these society people add to Elstir's work in their mind's eye that temporal perspective which enabled them to like, or…

— Marcel Proust

“Through art alone are we able to emerge from ourselves, to know what another person sees of a universe which is not…

— Marcel Proust

“then we would enter what he called his “study,” a room whose walls were hung with prints which showed, against a dark…

— Marcel Proust

And so when studying faces, we do indeed measure them, but as painters, not as surveyors.

— Marcel Proust

“It's far more difficult to disfigure a great work of art than to create one.”

— Marcel Proust

To be an artist is to fail, as no other dare to fail... failure is his world and the shrink from it…

— Marcel Proust

A work in which there are theories is like an object which still has the ticket that shows its price.

— Marcel Proust

“Art is not alone in imparting charm and mystery to the most insignificant things; pain is endowed with the same power to…

— Marcel Proust

A sort of egotistical self-evaluation is unavoidable in those joys in which erudition and art mingle and in which aesthetic pleasure may…

— Marcel Proust

Only through art can we get outside of ourselves and know another's view of the universe which is not the same as…

— Marcel Proust

“By art alone we can get out of ourselves, find out what another person sees of this universe which is not the…

— Marcel Proust

“It must be admitted that the results of this method of interpreting the art of making presents were not always happy. The…

— Marcel Proust

Thanks to art, instead of seeing one world only, our own, we see that world multiply itself and we have at our…

— Marcel Proust