A work should convey its entire meaning by itself, imposing it on the spectator even before he knows what the subject is.

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.

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.

The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it...

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

There is no idea that does not carry in itself a possible refutation, no word that does not imply its opposite.

After a certain age our memories are so intertwined with one another that what we are thinking of, the book we are reading, scarcely matters any more. We have put something of ourselves everywhere, everything is fertile, everything is dangerous, and we can make discoveries no less precious than in Pascal's Pensées in an advertisement for soap.