Marcel Proust

Reading is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.

It is in moments of illness that we are compelled to recognize that we live not alone but chained to a creature of a different kingdom, whole worlds apart, who has no knowledge of us and by whom it is impossible to make ourselves understood: our body.

We must never be afraid to go too far for success lies just beyond.

Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.

It is always during a passing state of mind that we make lasting resolutions.

Love is a reciprocal torture.

Your soul is a dark forest. But the trees are of a particular species, they are genealogical trees.

We are able to find everything in our memory, which is like a dispensary or chemical laboratory in which chance steers our hand sometimes to a soothing drug and sometimes to a dangerous poison.

People can have many different kinds of pleasure. The real one is that for which they will forsake the others.

Happiness serves hardly any other purpose than to make unhappiness possible.

In a separation it is the one who is not really in love who says the more tender things.

The only paradise is paradise lost.

Even in the most insignificant details of our daily life, none of us can be said to constitute a material whole, which is identical for everyone, and need only be turned up like a page in an account-book or the record of a will; our social personality is created by the thoughts of other people.

People do not die for us immediately, but remain bathed in a sort of aura of life which bears no relation to true immortality but through which they continue to occupy our thoughts in the same way as when they were alive. It is as though they were traveling abroad.

The fixity of a habit is generally in direct proportion to its absurdity.

Let us leave pretty women to men devoid of imagination.

A change in the weather is sufficient to recreate the world and ourselves.

We do not succeed in changing things according to our desire, but gradually our desire changes.

Habit is a second nature which prevents us from knowing the first of which it has neither the cruelties nor the enchantments.

The charms of the passing woman are generally in direct proportion to the swiftness of her passing.

A powerful idea communicates some of its strength to him who challenges it.

The time at our disposal each day is elastic; the passions we feel dilate it, those that inspire us shrink it, and habit fills it.

Let us be grateful to people who make us happy they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.

In a separation its the one who is not really in love who says the more tender things.

Let us be grateful to people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.

We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.

Time passes, and little by little everything that we have spoken in falsehood becomes true.

The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.

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

Love is space and time measured by the heart.

Like many intellectuals, he was incapable of saying a simple thing in a simple way.

Desire makes everything blossom.

After a certain age, the more one becomes oneself, the more obvious one's family traits become.

Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.

Time, which changes people, does not alter the image we have retained of them.

What a profound significance small things assume when the woman we love conceals them from us.

Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.

We can only be faithful to what we remember and we remember only what we have known.

Desire makes everything blossom; possession makes everything wither and fade.

Let us be grateful to people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.

Masterpieces are no more than the shipwrecked flotsam of great minds.

Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.

There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book.

The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.

The true voyage of discovery is not a journey to a new place; it is learning to see with new eyes.

The world was not created once and for all time for each of us individually. There are added to it in the course of our life things of which we have never had any suspicion.

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

If only for the sake of elegance, I try to remain morally pure.

Words do not change their meanings so drastically in the course of centuries as, in our minds, names do in the course of a year or two.

Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.

After luncheon the sun, conscious that it was Saturday, would blaze an hour longer in the zenith...

People wish to learn to swim and at the same time to keep one foot on the ground.

In theory one is aware that the earth revolves, but in practice one does not perceive it, the ground upon which one treads seems not to move, and one can live undisturbed. So it is with Time in one's life.

Illness is the most heeded of doctors: to goodness and wisdom we only make promises; pain we obey.

Perfume is that last and best reserve of the past, the one which when all out tears have run dry, can make us cry again!

Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and composed our masterpieces.

Human altruism which is not egoism, is sterile.

The tiny, initial clue ... by allowing us to imagine what we do not know, stimulates a desire for knowledge.

Our intonations contain our philosophy of life, what each of us is constantly telling himself about things.

We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it in full.

Like everybody who is not in love, he thought one chose the person to be loved after endless deliberations and on the basis of particular qualities or advantages.

Illness is the most heeded of doctors to goodness and wisdom we only make promises pain we obey.

Let us leave the beautiful women to men with no imagination.

We pack the physical outline of the creature we see with all the ideas we have already formed about him, and in the complete picture of him we compose in our minds those ideas have certainly the principal place.

It is not because other people are dead that our affection for them grows faint, it is because we ourselves are dying.

No exile at the South Pole or on the summit of Mont Blanc separates us more effectively from others than the practice of a hidden vice.

There was nothing abnormal about it when homosexuality was the norm.

We are healed from suffering only by experiencing it to the full.

The past not merely is not fugitive it remains present.

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

The real voyage of discovery consists of not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.

A little insomnia is not without its value in making us appreciate sleep in throwing a ray of light upon that darkness.

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

All our final decisions are made in a state of mind that is not going to last.

Let us be grateful to people who make us happy, they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.

The paradoxes of today are the prejudices of tomorrow, since the most benighted and the most deplorable prejudices have had their moment of novelty when fashion lent them its fragile grace.

A little insomnia is not without its value in making us appreciate sleep, in throwing a ray of light upon that darkness.

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.

Ideas are substitutes for sorrows.

Illness is the doctor to whom we pay most heed; to kindness, to knowledge, we make promise only; pain we obey.

We become moral when we are unhappy.

A woman one loves rarely suffices for all our needs, so we deceive her with another whom we do not love.

If a little dreaming is dangerous the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more to dream all the time.

Those whose suffering is due to love are, as we say of certain invalids, their own physicians.

If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time.

There is no man, however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived in a way the consciousness of which is so unpleasant to him in later life that he would gladly, if he could, expunge it from his memory.

Only through art can we emerge from ourselves and know what another person sees.

Habit is a second nature which prevents us from knowing the first, of which it has neither the cruelties nor the enchantments.

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 more powerful than any microbe the idea that one is ill.

A fashionable milieu is one in which everybody's opinion is made up of the opinion of all the others. Has everybody a different opinion? Then it is a literary milieu.

As long as men are free to ask what they must, free to say what they think, free to think what they will, freedom can never be lost and science can never regress.

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new landscapes, but in having new eyes.

Instead of seeking new landscapes, develop new eyes.

Three-quarters of the sicknesses of intelligent people come from their intelligence. They need at least a doctor who can understand this sickness.

A sort of egotistical self evaluation is unavoidable in those joys in which erudition and art mingle and in which aesthetic pleasure may become more acute but not remain as pure.

The smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us.

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