Marcel Proust Quotes

315 quotes in 3640 categories

• We do not succeed in changing things according to our desire, but gradually our desire changes. The situation that we hoped to change because it…
• A little insomnia is not without its value in making us appreciate sleep, in throwing a ray of light upon that darkness.
• Less disappointing than life, great works of art do not begin by giving us all their best.
• Our intellect is not the most subtle, the most powerful, the most appropriate, instrument for revealing the truth. It is life that, little by little,…
• The moments of the past do not remain still; they retain in our memory the motion which drew them towards the future, towards a future…
• There's nothing like desire to prevent the things one says from having any resemblance to the things in one's mind.
• The only true voyage of discovery, . . . would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes.
• If, I can someday see M. Claude Monet's garden, I feel sure that I shall see something that is not so much a garden of…
• The features of our face are hardly more than gestures which force of habit made permanent. Nature, like the destruction of Pompeii, like the metamorphosis…
• There can be no peace of mind in love, since the advantage one has secured is never anything but a fresh starting-point for future desires.
• Indeed, among the lesser auxiliaries to success in love, an absence, the declining of an invitation to dinner, an unintentional, unconscious harshness are of more…
• Thanks to art, instead of seeing one world, our own, we see it multiplied and as many original artists as there are, so many worlds…
• The loss of a sense adds as much beauty to the world as its acquisition.
• Similarly the men who produce works of genius are not those who live in the most delicate atmosphere, whose conversation is most brilliant, or their…
• I drank a second mouthful in which I find nothing more than in the first, then a third which gives me rather less than the…
• Medicine being a compendium of the successive and contradictory mistakes of medical practitioners, when we summon the wisest of them to our aid, the chances…
• Wars are fought for the benefit of oligarchs, triumphs bought with the blood of peons.
• Often it is just lack of imagination that keeps a man from suffering very much.
• I understood that all the material of a literary work was in my past life, I understood that I had acquired it in the midst…
• For each illness that doctors cure with medicine, they provoke ten in healthy people by inoculating them with the virus that is a thousand times…

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