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Mind Quotes by Marcel Proust

40 Mind quotes by Marcel Proust

All Mind quotes Marcel Proust’s page

Marcel Proust writes that the connections we feel with others live only inside our own minds. He says truth often arrives from outside when we least expect it, and that the body can act like a fortress that traps the mind. He also notes that desire can stop our words from matching what we truly think.

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Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.

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All the mind's activity is easy if it is not subjected to reality.

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It is always during a passing state of mind that we make lasting resolutions.

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The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it…

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

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“It is grief that develops the powers of the mind.”

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

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All our final decisions are made in a state of mind that is not going to last.

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There can be no peace of mind in love, since the advantage one has secured is never anything but a fresh starting-point…

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It is the tragedy of other people that they are to us merely showcases for the very perishable collections of our own…

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We see things but we don't see them, like things that slid through the mind, one flowing into another.

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The inertia of the mind urges it to slide down the easy slope of imagination, rather than to climb the steep slope…

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“It is always thus, impelled by a state of mind which is destined not to last, that we make our irrevocable decisions.”

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

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Having a body is in itself the greatest threat to the mind... The body encloses the mind in a fortress; before long…

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There's nothing like desire to prevent the things one says from having any resemblance to the things in one's mind.

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Reading is at the threshold of the spiritual life; it can introduce us to it. It does not constitute it ... There…

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The reason why a work of genius is not easily admired from the first is that the man who has created it…

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Habit! that skilful but slow-moving arranger who begins by letting our minds suffer for weeks on end in temporary quarters, but whom…

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“since his mind no longer entertained any lofty ideals, he had ceased to believe in (although he could not have expressly denied)…

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We pack the physical outline of the creature we see with all the ideas we have already formed about him, and in…

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We are less justified in saying that the thinking life of humanity is a miraculous perfectioning of animal and physical life than…

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“Carried away in a sort of dream, he smiled, then he began to hurry back towards the lady; he was walking faster…

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Reading is at the threshold of spiritual life; it can introduce us to it; it does not constitute it. There are, however,…

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Our intellect is not the most subtle, the most powerful, the most appropriate, instrument for revealing the truth. It is life that,…

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“As long as reading is for us the instigator whose magic keys have opened the door to those dwelling-places deep within us…

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“He recognised that all the period of Odette's life which had elapsed before she first met him, a period of which he…

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“Compared with that of a great artist, the friendliness of a great nobleman, however charming it may be, seems like play-acting, like…

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“Ah! whatever you may say, it’s good to be alive all the same, my dear Amédée!” And then, abruptly, the memory of…

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When the mind has a tendency to dream, it is a mistake to keep dreams away from it, to ration its dreams.…

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Our virtues themselves are not free and floating qualities over which we retain a permanent control and power of disposal; they come…

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None of us constitutes a material whole, identical for everyone, which a person has only to go look up as though we…

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What an abyss of uncertainty, whenever the mind feels overtaken by itself; when it, the seeker, is at the same time the…

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A powerful idea communicates some of its power to the man who contradicts it. Partaking of the universal community of minds, it…

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We may have revolved every possible idea in our minds, and yet the truth has never occurred to us, and it is…

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The bonds between ourselves and another person exists only in our minds. Memory as it grows fainter loosens them, and notwithstanding the…

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And wasn't my mind also like another crib in the depths of which I felt I remained ensconced, even in order to…

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These dreams reminded me that, since I wished some day to become a writer, it was high time to decide what sort…

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The bonds that unite another person to ourselves exist only in our mind. Memory as it grows fainter relaxes them, and notwithstanding…

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In the sort of screen dappled with different states of mind which my consciousness would simultaneously unfold while I read, and which…

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More by Marcel Proust

“machinery' of life at Versailles; and was able, too, to persuade herself that her silence, a shade of good humour or of arrogance on…

“For her [Françoise], wealth was like a necessary condition without which virtue would lack both merit and charm. She made so little distinction between…

Knowing does not always allow us to prevent, but at least the things that we know, we hold them, if not in our hands,…

Death is in truth an illness from which we recover

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

...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…

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

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

I find very reasonable the Celtic belief that the souls of our dearly departed are trapped in some inferior being, in an animal, aplant,…

“When you heard anyone in the middle of a talk which was being deliberately kept off the Affair announce furtively some piece of political…

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

“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…

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

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

“Nobility is often no more than the inner aspect which our egotistical feelings assume when we have not yet named and classified them.”