Authors - Marcel Proust
Brief Biography
Valentin Louis Georges Eugene Marcel Proust (10 July 1871 - 18 November 1922) was a French novelist, critic, and essayist best known for his monumental A la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time; earlier translated as Remembrance of Things Past). It was published in seven parts between 1913 and 1927. - Wikipedia
Quotes by Marcel ProustBrowse all of these
Quote 1192by Anonymous on 11/01/2011
Time, which changes people, does not alter the image we have retained of them.
Quote 1291by Anonymous on 12/01/2011
I perceived that to express those impressions, to write that essential book, which is the only true one, a great writer does not, in the current meaning of the word, invent it, but, since it exists already in each one of us, interprets it. The duty and the task of a writer are those of an interpreter.
Quote 1328by Anonymous on 12/01/2011
A powerful idea communicates some of its strength to him who challenges it.
Quote 1477by Anonymous on 14/01/2011
The bonds that unite another person to our self exist only in our mind.
Quote 1595by Anonymous on 14/01/2011
Lies are essential to humanity. They are perhaps as important as the pursuit of pleasure and moreover are dictated by that pursuit.
Quote 1659by Anonymous on 15/01/2011
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.
Quote 1672by Anonymous on 15/01/2011
Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.
Quote 1797by Anonymous on 16/01/2011
We are healed from suffering only by experiencing it to the full.
Quote 1916by Anonymous on 19/01/2011
People who are not in love fail to understand how an intelligent man can suffer because of a very ordinary woman. This is like being surprised that anyone should be stricken with cholera because of a creature so insignificant as the comma bacillus.
Quote 1965by Anonymous on 19/01/2011
People wish to learn to swim and at the same time to keep one foot on the ground.
Quote 1996by Anonymous on 20/01/2011
We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.
Quote 2144by Anonymous on 22/01/2011
There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book.
Quote 2308by Anonymous on 27/01/2011
Less disappointing than life, great works of art do not begin by giving us all their best.
Quote 2442by Anonymous on 29/01/2011
If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time.
Quote 2573by Anonymous on 02/02/2011
As soon as one is unhappy one becomes moral.
Quote 2579by Anonymous on 02/02/2011
We must never be afraid to go too far, for success lies just beyond.
Quote 2599by Anonymous on 02/02/2011
If only for the sake of elegance, I try to remain morally pure.
Quote 2653by Anonymous on 03/02/2011
What a profound significance small things assume when the woman we love conceals them from us.
Quote 2745by Anonymous on 03/02/2011
It is always thus, impelled by a state of mind which is destined not to last, that we make our irrevocable decisions.
Quote 2882by Anonymous on 03/02/2011
Let us leave pretty women to men devoid of imagination.
Quote 3194by Anonymous on 05/02/2011
Time passes, and little by little everything that we have spoken in falsehood becomes true.
Quote 3342by Anonymous on 05/02/2011
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.
Quote 3421by Anonymous on 06/02/2011
It is often hard to bear the tears that we ourselves have caused.
Quote 3737by Anonymous on 09/02/2011
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 which has itself become the past, and draw us on in their train.
Quote 3777by Anonymous on 10/02/2011
Let us be grateful to people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.
Quote 3892by Anonymous on 12/02/2011
The charms of the passing woman are generally in direct proportion to the swiftness of her passing.
Quote 4199by Anonymous on 16/02/2011
The time which we have at our disposal every day is elastic; the passions we feel expand it, those that we inspire contract it, and habit fills up what remains.
Quote 4209by Anonymous on 17/02/2011
The mistakes made by doctors are innumerable. They err habitually on the side of optimism as to treatment, of pessimism as to the outcome.
Quote 4288by Anonymous on 18/02/2011
It is seldom indeed that one parts on good terms, because if one were on good terms, one would not part.
Quote 4485by Anonymous on 22/02/2011
Illness is the doctor to whom we pay most heed; to kindness, to knowledge, we make promise only; pain we obey.
Quote 4637by Anonymous on 25/02/2011
In a separation it is the one who is not really in love who says the more tender things.
Quote 4640by Anonymous on 25/02/2011
Like many intellectuals, he was incapable of saying a simple thing in a simple way.
Quote 4647by Anonymous on 25/02/2011
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.
Quote 4688by Anonymous on 25/02/2011
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.
Quote 4694by Anonymous on 25/02/2011
The only thing that does not change is that at any and every time it appears that there have been 'great changes.'
Quote 4779by Anonymous on 27/02/2011
Any mental activity is easy if it need not take reality into account.
Quote 4827by Anonymous on 01/03/2011
Our memory is like a shop in the window of which is exposed now one, now another photograph of the same person. And as a rule the most recent exhibit remains for some time the only one to be seen.
Quote 5115by Anonymous on 20/05/2011
Desire makes everything blossom; possession makes everything wither and fade.
Quote 5331by Anonymous on 20/06/2011
Only through art can we get outside of ourselves and know another's view of the universe.
Quote 10219by Anonymous on 21/09/2012
Three-quarters of the sicknesses of intelligent people come from their intelligence. They need at least a doctor who can understand this sickness.
Quote 12171by Anonymous on 14/03/2013
Let us be grateful to people who make us happy, they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.
