Proust, Marcel quotes

1871-1922 French Novelist

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

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

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.
Proust, Marcel
Doctors

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 of frivolous amusements, in idleness, in tenderness and in pain, stored up by me without my divining its destination or even its survival, as the seed has in reserve all the ingredients which will nourish the plant.
Proust, Marcel
Creativity

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.
Proust, Marcel
Death and Dying

Impelled by a state of mind which is destined not to last, we make our irrevocable decisions
Proust, Marcel
Decisions

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

There s nothing like desire to prevent the things one says from having any resemblance to the things in one s mind.
Proust, Marcel
Desire

Things don t change, but by and by our wishes change.
Proust, Marcel
Change

The charms of the passing woman are generally in direct proportion to the swiftness of her passing.
Proust, Marcel
Charm

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

A cathedral, a wave of storm, a dancer s leap, never turn out to be as high as we had hoped.
Proust, Marcel
Expectation

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

The regularity of a habit is generally in proportion to its absurdity.
Proust, Marcel
Habit

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

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 of a nymph into a tree, has arrested us in an accustomed movement.
Proust, Marcel
Faces

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

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

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.
Proust, Marcel
Memory

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

That translucent alabaster of our memories.
Proust, Marcel
Memory

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.
Proust, Marcel
Memory

A powerful idea communicates some of its strength to him who challenges it.
Proust, Marcel
Ideas

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.
Proust, Marcel
Intelligence and Intellectuals

In a separation it is the one who is not really in loved who says the more tender things.
Proust, Marcel
Love Ended

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

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.
Proust, Marcel
Paradox

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.
Proust, Marcel
Love

The human plagiarism which is most difficult to avoid, for individuals... is the plagiarism of ourselves.
Proust, Marcel
Plagiarism

The sensitiveness claimed by neurotic is matched by their egotism: they cannot abide the flaunting by others of the sufferings to which they pay an even increasing amount of attention in themselves.
Proust, Marcel
Neurosis

Neurosis has an absolute genius for malingering. There is no illness which it cannot counterfeit perfectly. If it is capable of deceiving the doctor, how should it fail to deceive the patient?
Proust, Marcel
Neurosis

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.
Proust, Marcel
Past

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

Let us leave pretty women to men devoid of imagination.
Proust, Marcel
Men and Women

Everything great that we know has come from neurotics never will the world be aware of how much it owes to them, nor above all what they have suffered in order to bestow their gifts on it.
Proust, Marcel
Neurosis

We become moral when we are unhappy.
Proust, Marcel
Morality

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

The bonds that unite another person to our self exist only in our mind.
Proust, Marcel
Relationships

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

We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it in full.
Proust, Marcel
Suffering

What a profound significance small things assume when the woman we love conceals them from us.
Proust, Marcel
Things and Little Things

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.
Proust, Marcel
Regret

It is always during a passing state of mind that we make lasting resolutions.
Proust, Marcel
Resolution

A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left.
Proust, Marcel
Arts and Artists

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.
Proust, Marcel
Bed

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

Life is extraordinarily suave and sweet with certain natural, witty, affectionate people who have unusual distinction and are capable of every vice, but who make a display of none in public and about whom no one can affirm they have a single one. There is something supple and secret about them. Besides, their perversity gives spice to their most innocent occupations, such as taking a walk in the garden at night.
Proust, Marcel
Vice

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.
Proust, Marcel
Writers and Writing

A change in the weather is sufficient to recreate the world and ourselves.
Proust, Marcel
Weather

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.
Proust, Marcel
Vice