“It was fortunate that I had not already yielded to the temptation to break with Albertine; the tedium of having to rejoin… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
It is up to my spirit to find the truth. But how? Grave uncertainty, each time the spirit feels beyond its own… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
“Saddened by the misfortune of the Jews, remembering his friendship with Christians, increasingly mannered and affected as time went on for reasons… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
The time at our disposal each day is elastic; the passions we feel dilate it, those that inspire us shrink it, and… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
I had come in time to learn that it was a mistake to smile a friendly smile when somebody made a fool… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
“I loved her [Gilberte]; I was sorry not to have had the time and the inspiration to insult her, to hurt her,… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
“Moreover — just as in moments of musing contemplation of nature, the normal actions of the mind being suspended, and our abstract… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
There are mountainous, arduous days, up which one takes an infinite time to climb, and downward-sloping days which one can descend at… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
To understand a profound thought is to have, at the moment one understands it, a profound thought oneself; and this demands some… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
...the memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment.. — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
The time which we have at our disposal every day is elastic; the passions we feel expand it, those that we inspire… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
We strive all the time to give our life its form, but we do so by copying willy-nilly, like a drawing, the… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
The only thing that does not change is that at any and every time it appears that there have been great changes. — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
“As a rule it is with our being reduced to a minimum that we live; most of our faculties lie dormant because… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
For a long time I would go to bed early. [Fr., Longtemps, je me suis couche de bonne heure.] — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
Griefs, at the moment when they change into ideas, lose some of their power to injure our heart. — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
We are at times too ready to believe that the present is the only possible state of things. — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
“I walked past her, thinking: Is this what happens to the youth of women? Those whom we have met in the past,… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
“For, medicine being a compendium of the successive and contradictory mistakes of medical practitioners, when we summon the wisest of them to… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
Theoretically, we know that the world turns, but in fact we do not notice it, the earth on which we walk does… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
“This was not to say, however, that she did not long, at times, for some greater change, that she did not experience… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
The moments of the past do not remain still; they retain in our memory the motion which drew them towards the future,… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
“When nothing else subsists from the past, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered...the smell and taste… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
“Now there is one thing I can tell you: you will enjoy certain pleasures you would not fathom now. When you still… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
“We remember the truth because it has a name, is rooted in the past, but a makeshift lie is quickly forgotten.” — 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
