“We feel very strongly that our own wisdom begins where that of the author leaves off and we could like him to provide us with desires... That is the value of reading and is also its inadequacy. To make it into discipline is to give too large a role to what is only an incitement. Reading is on the threshold… — Marcel Proust Copy Share
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
“I had reached the point, at Balbec, of regarding the pleasure of playing with a troop of girls as less destructive of… — 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
“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
We are less justified in saying that the thinking life of humanity is a miraculous perfectioning of animal and physical life than… — 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 emptied of that past which was life until then. And perhaps it is more wonderful still when our landing at the waking-point is abrupt and the thoughts of our sleep, hidden by a cloak of oblivion,… — 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 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, an inanimate object, indeed lost to us until the day, which for some never arrives, when we find that we pass near the tree, or come to possess the object which is their prison. Then they… — 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 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