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Truth Quotes by Marcel Proust

39 Truth quotes by Marcel Proust

All Truth quotes Marcel Proust’s page

Marcel Proust notes that death can feel like an illness we eventually recover from, and that jokes often hide deeper worries. He writes that truth sometimes arrives unexpectedly, that lying can be a human tool, and that reading reveals the reader’s own truth.

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Error, by force of contrast, enhances the triumph of Truth.

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The most familiar precepts are not always the truest.

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“We don't receive wisdom we must discover it for ourselves.”

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We must never be afraid to go too far, for truth lies beyond.

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Lies are essential to humanity.

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Truth is a point of view about things.

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Death is in truth an illness from which we recover

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“The truth I am seeking is not in the drink, but in me”

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“Monsieur Beulier never engaged in thought except to speak the truth, and never spoke except to express his thought.”

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The truth is that men can have several sorts of pleasure. The true pleasure is the one for which they abandon the…

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It is not only by dint of lying to others, but also of lying to ourselves, that we cease to notice that…

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“We remember the truth because it has a name, is rooted in the past, but a makeshift lie is quickly forgotten.”

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You can't learn the truth about a man's intentions by asking him.

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Lies are essential to humanity. They are perhaps as important as the pursuit of pleasure and moreover are dictated by that pursuit.

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“Cathedrals are to be adored until the day when, to preserve them, it would be necessary to deny the truths which they…

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There is not a woman in the world the possession of whom is as precious as that of the truths which she…

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The truth is that every morning war is declared afresh. And the men who wish to continue it are as guilty as…

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“A person has no need of sincerity, nor even of skill in lying, in order to be loved. Here I mean by…

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“Yes, I have been forced to whittle down the facts, and to be a liar, but it is not one universe, but…

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“Truth and life are very difficult to fathom, and I retained of them, without really having got to know them, an impression…

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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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Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself. The writer's work is only a kind of optical instrument he…

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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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“We imagine always when we speak that it is our own ears, our own mind, that are listening. The truth which one…

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“The lie, the perfect lie, about people we know, about the relations we have with them, about our motive for some action,…

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“even when a political truth is enshrined in written documents, it is seldom that these have any more value than a radiographic…

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The truth has no need to be uttered to be made apparent, and ... one may perhaps gather it with more certainty,…

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“The truth, even more, is that life is perpetually weaving fresh threads which link one individual and one event to another, and…

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“But she was wrong; it was what gave her away; she had not taken into account that this fragmentary detail of the…

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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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“Had my parents allowed me, when I read a book, to pay a visit to the region it described, I should have…

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“Next to this central belief which,while I was reading, would be constantly reaching out from my inner self to the outer world,…

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“The truth was that, with the Duchess de Luxembourg, with Mme de Morienval, Mme de Saint-Euverte and any number of others, the…

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“The novelist’s happy discovery was to think of substituting for those opaque sections, impenetrable by the human spirit, their equivalent in immaterial…

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“All those beings who revealed truths to me and who were no longer there, seemed to me to have lived a life…

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“Lies, so often misleading and which form the substance of all conversations, are less effective in covering up a feeling of dislike…

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It is up to my spirit to find the truth. But how? Grave uncertainty, each time the spirit feels beyond its own…

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“In the case of Albertine, I felt that I should never discover anything, that, out of that tangled mass of details of…

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“The things about which we most often jest are generally, on the contrary, the things that worry us but that we do…

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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.”