Marcel proust quotes

The only true voyage, the only bath in the Fountain of Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them sees, that each of them is; and this we do [with great artists]; with artists like these we do really fly from star to star.

How paradoxical it is to search reality for the pictures that are stored in one's memory.

Only by art can we get outside ourselves, instead of seeing only one world, our own, we see it under multiple forms.

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

If there is one thing more difficult than submitting oneself to a regime it is refraining from imposing it on other people.

We are at times too ready to believe that the present is the only possible state of things.

Friendship is in the end no more than: " . . . a lie which seeks to make us believe that we are not irremediably alone."

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

When you work to please others you can't succeed, but the things you do to satisfy yourself stand a chance of catching someone's interest.

Love...., ever unsatisfied, lives always in the moment that is about to come.

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

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

There is no more ridiculous custom than the one that makes you express sympathy once and for all on a given day to a person whose sorrow will endure as long as his life. Such grief, felt in such a way is always present, it is never too late to talk about it, never repetitious to mention it again.

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.

To be an artist is to fail, as no other dare to fail... failure is his world and the shrink from it desertion

Always try to keep a patch of sky above your life.

There are optical illusions in time as well as space.

One must never miss an opportunity of quoting things by others which are always more interesting than those one thinks up oneself.

The highest praise of God consists in the denial of him by the atheist who finds creation so perfect that it can dispense with a creator.

She's got feet like boats, whiskers like an American, and her undies are filthy.

It is often hard to bear the tears that we ourselves have caused.

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

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

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

What barrier is so insurmountable as silence?

There comes in all our lives a time ... when the ears can listen to no music save what the moonlight breathes through the flute of silence.

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.

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

with one image he would make that beauty explode into me.

Do not wait for life. Do not long for it. Be aware, always and at every moment, that the miracle is in the here and now.

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

Desire makes everything blossom

My destination is no longer a place, rather a new way of seeing.

The heart does not lie.

When we have passed a certain age, the soul of the child that we were and the souls of the dead from whom we sprang come and shower upon us their riches and their spells, asking to be allowed to contribute to the new emotions which we feel and in which, erasing their former image, we recast them in an original creation.

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

We see things but we don't see them, like things that slid through the mind, one flowing into another.

But sometimes illumination comes to our rescue at the very moment when all seems lost; we have knocked at every door and they open on nothing until, at last, we stumble unconsciously against the only one through which we can enter the kingdom we have sought in vain a hundred years - and it opens.

Under each station of the real, another glimmers.

When from a long distant past nothing subsists after the things are broken and scattered, the smell and taste of things remain.

Instead of seeking new landscapes, develop new eyes.

All the mind's activity is easy if it is not subjected to reality.

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

It has been said that beauty is a promise of happiness. Conversely, the possibility of pleasure can be a beginning of beauty.

No man is a complete mystery except to himself.

We believe we can change things according to our wishes because that's the only happy solution we can see. We don't think of what usually happens and what is also a happy solution; things don't change, but by and by our wishes change.

The artist who gives up an hour of work for an hour of conversation with a friend knows that he is sacrificing a reality for something that does not exist.

The only paradise is paradise lost.

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

The creation of the world did not occur at the beginning of time, it occurs every day.

The only true voyage of discovery, . . . would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes.

Things don't change, but by and by our wishes change.

Let us be grateful to people who make us happy.

Love is a striking example of how little reality means to us.

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

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.

When we are in love, our love is too big a thing for us to be able altogether to contain it within ourselves. It radiates towards the loved one, finds there a surface which arrests it, forcing it to return to its starting-point, and it is this repercussion of our own feeling which we call the other's feelings and which charms us more then than on its outward journey because we do not recognise it as having originated in ourselves.

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, example by example, permits us to see that what is most important to our heart, or to our mind, is learned not by reasoning but through other agencies. Then it is that the intellect, observing their superiority, abdicates its control to them upon reasoned grounds and agrees to become their collaborator and lackey.

It is comforting when one has a sorrow to lie in the warmth of one's bed and there, abandoning all effort and all resistance, to bury even one's head under the cover, giving one's self up to it completely, moaning like branches in the autumn wind. But there is still a better bed, full of divine odors. It is our sweet, our profound, our impenetrable friendship.

An hour is not merely an hour, it is a vase full of scents and sounds and projects and climates.

Through art alone are we able to emerge from ourselves, to know what another person sees of a universe which is not the same as our own and of which, without art, the landscapes would remain as unknown to us as those that may exist on the moon.

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 was intolerable becomes unimportant. We have not managed to surmount the obstacle, as we were absolutely determined to do, but life has taken us round it, led us past it, and then if we turn round to gaze at the remote past, we can barely catch sight of it, so imperceptible has it become.

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

A photograph acquires something of the dignity which it ordinarily lacks when it ceases to be a reproduction of reality and shows us things that no longer exist.

It comes so soon, the moment when there is nothing left to wait for.

Death is in truth an illness from which we recover

Reality is never more than a first step towards an unknown on the road to which one can never progress very far.

We say that the hour of death cannot be forecast, but when we say this we imagine that hour as placed in an obscure and distant future. It never occurs to us that it has any connection with the day already begun or that death could arrive this same afternoon, this afternoon which is so certain and which has every hour filled in advance.

We love only what we do not wholly possess.

The bonds between ourselves and another person exists only in our minds. Memory as it grows fainter loosens them, and notwithstanding the illusion by which we want to be duped and which, out of love, friendship, politeness, deference, duty, we dupe other people, we exist alone. Man is the creature who cannot escape from himself, who knows other people only in himself, and when he asserts the contrary, he is lying.

Truth is a point of view about things.

We are all of us obliged, if we are to make reality endurable, to nurse a few little follies in ourselves.

When the mind has a tendency to dream, it is a mistake to keep dreams away from it, to ration its dreams. So long as you distract your mind from its dreams, it will not know them for what they are; you will always be being taken in by the appearance of things, because you will not have grasped their true nature. If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time. One must have a thorough understanding of one

One becomes moral as soon as one is unhappy.

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

Sometimes in this life, under the stress of an exceptional emotion, people do say what they think.

Even though our lives wander, our memories remain in one place.

Just as those who practice the same profession recognize each other instinctively, so do those who practice the same vice.

The loss of a sense adds as much beauty to the world as its acquisition.

The bonds that unite us to another human being are sanctified when he or she adopts the same point of view as ourselves in judging one of our imperfections.

We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world.

When I am not too sad to listen, music is my consolation.

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.

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 are at our disposal.

Nine tenths of the ills from which intelligent people suffer spring from their intellect.

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

Thanks to art, instead of seeing one world only, our own, we see that world multiply itself and we have at our disposal as many worlds as there are original artists, worlds more different one from the other than those which revolve in infinite space, worlds which, centuries after the extinction of the fire from which their light first emanated, whether it is called Rembrandt or Vermeer, send us still each one its special radiance.

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

Let us leave pretty women to men devoid of imagination.

And wasn't my mind also like another crib in the depths of which I felt I remained ensconced, even in order to watch what was happening outside? When I saw an external object, my awareness that I was seeing it would remain between me and it, lining it with a thin spiritual border that prevented me from ever directly touching its substance; it would volatize in some way before I could make contact with it, just as an incandescent body brought near a wet object never touches its moisture because it is always preceded by a zone of evaporation.

To write that essential book, a great writer does not need to invent it but merely to translate it, since it already exists in each one of us. The duty and task of a writer are those of translator.

To the pure all things are pure!

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

The heart changes...but we learn of it only from reading or by imagination; for in reality its alteration, like that of certain natural phenomena, is so gradual that, even if we are able to distinguish, successively, each of its different states, we are still spared the actual sensation of change.

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

I do my intellectual work inside myself, and once I am with my fellow creatures it is more or less a matter of indifference to me whether or not they are intelligent as long as they are kind, sincere, etc.

Even from the simplest, the most realistic point of view, the countries which we long for occupy, at any given moment, a far larger place in our actual life than the country in which we happen to be.

If we are to make reality endurable, we must all nourish a fantasy or two.

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

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

In times like ours, where the growing complexity of life leaves us barely the time to read the newspapers, where the map of Europehas endured profound rearrangements and is perhaps on the brink of enduring yet others, where so many threatening and new problems appear everywhere, you will admit it may be demanded of a writer that he be more than a fine wit who makes us forget in idle and byzantine discussions on the merits of pure form.

We live not alone but chained to a creature of a different kingdom: our body.

The most familiar precepts are not always the truest.

Everything we think of as great has come to us from neurotics. It is they and they alone who found religions and create great works of art. The world will never realize how much it owes to them and what they have suffered in order to bestow their gifts on it.

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

Dear Friend: I have nearly died three times since morning.

We think and name in one world, we live and feel in another.

The memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment.

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

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

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

Women who are to some extent resistant, whom one cannot possess at once, whom one does not even know at first whether one will ever possess, are the only interesting ones.

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

Love is a reciprocal torture.

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

How else learn the real, if not by inventing what might lie outside it?

Love is space and time measured by the heart.

The courage of one's opinions is always a form of calculating cowardice in the eyes of the "other side.

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

Le temps qui change les e" tres ne modifie pas l'image que nous avons garde e d'eux. Although time changes people, it cannot change the image we have already made of them.

Wisdom cannot be imparted. Wisdom that a wise man attempts to impart always sounds like foolishness to someone else ... Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, live it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it.” - Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha "We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us from.

A picture's beauty does not depend on the things portrayed in it.

People don't know when they are happy. They're never so unhappy as they think they are.

A woman whom we need and who makes us suffer elicits from us a whole gamut of feelings far more profound and vital than a man of genius who interests us.

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