Habit is a second nature which prevents us from knowing the first, of which it has neither the cruelties nor the enchantments. — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
According to a charming law of nature which is evident even in the most sophisticated societies, we live in complete ignorance of… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
“What had to move - a leaf of the chestnut tree, for instance - moved.” — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
“And between the earth and its creatures I made no distinction. I had a desire for a peasant-girl from Méséglise or Roussainville,… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
“But the true nature which we repress continues nevertheless to abide within us. Thus it is that at times, if we read… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
“There is a degree of resemblance between the women we love at different times; and this resemblance, though it devolves, derives from… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
“For at that time everything which was not myself, the earth and the creatures upon it, seemed to me more precious, more… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
The features of our face are hardly more than gestures which force of habit made permanent. Nature, like the destruction of Pompeii,… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
It is the wicked deception of love that it begins by making us dwell not upon a woman in the outside world… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
“But if this desire that a woman should appear added for me something more exalting than the charms of nature, they in… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
“The woods, the vines, the very stones, were at one with the brightness of the sun and the unblemished sky, and even… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
“They were in no way connected now with nature, with the world of real things, which from now onwards lost all its… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
“I concluded all the same from this first evening that his [Morel's] must be a vile nature, that he would not shrink… — 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 Image
“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 Image
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 Image
The bonds that unite another person to our self exist only in our mind. — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
...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 Image
“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 Image
“Art extracted from the most familiar reality does indeed exist and its domain is perhaps the largest of any.” — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
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 Image
“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 Image
“We betroth ourselves by proxy, and then feel obliged to marry the intermediary.” — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
“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 Image
