Marcel Proust

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

— Marcel Proust

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

— Marcel Proust

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

— Marcel Proust

Death is in truth an illness from which we recover

— Marcel Proust

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

— Marcel Proust

...a writer's works, like the water in an artesian well, mount to a height which is in proportion to the depth to…

— Marcel Proust

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

— Marcel Proust

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

— Marcel Proust

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

— Marcel Proust

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

— Marcel Proust

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

— Marcel Proust

“But the old lady on the contrary, far from justifying her daughter’s fears, felt every time someone of her own age “disappeared”…

— Marcel Proust

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

— Marcel Proust

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

— Marcel Proust

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

— Marcel Proust

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

— Marcel Proust

“since she would never have practised the cult of these things, she would take no impious delight in their profanation.”

— Marcel Proust

“...for if our life is vagabond our memory is sedentary and though we ourselves rush ceaselessly forward our recollections, indissolubly bound to…

— Marcel Proust

“And it is because they contain thus within themselves the hours of the past that human bodies have the power to hurt…

— Marcel Proust

In his younger days a man dreams of possessing the heart of the woman whom he loves; later, the feeling that he…

— Marcel Proust

We ought at least, from prudence, never to speak of ourselves, because that is a subject on which we may be sure…

— Marcel Proust

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

— Marcel Proust

“And if she had appeared, would I have dared to speak to her? I felt that she would have regarded me as…

— Marcel Proust

“We must bear in mind that the character which a man exhibits in the latter half if his life is not always,…

— Marcel Proust

“...genius, having the widest experience of the human intelligence, can best understand the ideas most directly in opposition to those which form…

— Marcel Proust