At a certain age, we have already been struck by love; it no longer develops alone, according to its own mysteries and fateful laws while our hearts stand by startled and passive. We come to its assistanceRecognizing one of its symptoms, we recall, we bring back to life the others. Since we possess its song engraved in its totality within us, we do not need for a woman to tell us the beginning--filled with admiration inspired by beauty--to find the continuation.
Marcel ProustFor, just as in the beginning it is formed by desire, so afterwards love is kept in existence only by painful anxiety.
Marcel ProustEverybody calls "clear" those ideas which have the same degree of confusion as his own.
Marcel ProustThere is no idea that does not carry in itself a possible refutation, no word that does not imply its opposite.
Marcel ProustFor everyone who, having no artistic sense-that is to say, no submission to subjective reality-may have the knack of reasoning about art till doomsday, especially if he be, in addition, a diplomat or financier in contact with the 'realities' of the present day, is only too ready to believe literature is an intellectual game which is destined to gradually be abandoned as time goes on.
Marcel ProustA 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.
Marcel ProustTo be an artist is to fail, as no other dare to fail... failure is his world and the shrink from it desertion
Marcel ProustOur intonations contain our philosophy of life, what each of us is constantly telling himself about things.
Marcel ProustHabit is a second nature which prevents us from knowing the first, of which it has neither the cruelties nor the enchantments.
Marcel ProustReading is at the threshold of spiritual life; it can introduce us to it; it does not constitute it. There are, however, certain cases, certain pathological cases, so to speak, of spiritual depression in which reading can become a sort of curative discipline and assume the task, through repeated stimulation, of continuously reintroducing a lazy mind into the life of the spirit.
Marcel ProustA woman one loves rarely suffices for all our needs, so we deceive her with another whom we do not love.
Marcel ProustPerhaps the pleasure one feels in writing is not the infallible test of the literary value of a page; perhaps it is only a secondary state which is often superadded, but the want of which can have no prejudicial effect on it. Perhaps some of the greatest masterpieces were written while yawning.
Marcel ProustEach reader reads only what is already within himself. The book is only a sort of optical instrument which the writer offers to the reader to enable the latter to discover in himself what he would not have found but for the aid of the book.
Marcel ProustThe great quality of true art is that it rediscovers, grasps and reveals to us that reality far from where we live, from which we get farther and farther away as the conventional knowledge we substitute for it becomes thicker and more impermeable.
Marcel ProustI was not at all worried about finding my doctor boring; I expected from him, thanks to an art of which the laws escaped me, that he pronounce concerning my health an indisputable oracle by consulting my entrails.
Marcel ProustIllness is the most heeded of doctors: to goodness and wisdom we only make promises; pain we obey.
Marcel ProustA person does not...stand motionless and clear before our eyes with his merits, his defects, his plans, his intentions with regard to ourself exposed on his surface...but is a shadow which we can never succeed in penetrating...a shadow behind which we can alternately imagine, with equal justification, that there burns the flame of hatred and of love.
Marcel ProustNow the same mystery which often veils from our eyes the reason for a catastrophe envelops just as frequently, when love is in question, the suddenness of certain happy solutions, such as had been brought to me by Gilberte's letter. Happy, or at least seemingly happy, for there are few that can really be happy when we are dealing with a sentiment of such a kind that any satisfaction we can give it does no more, as a rule, than dislodge some pain. And yet sometimes a respite is granted us, and we have for a little while the illusion of being healed.
Marcel ProustThe true voyage of discovery is not a journey to a new place; it is learning to see with new eyes.
Marcel ProustWars are fought for the benefit of oligarchs, triumphs bought with the blood of peons.
Marcel ProustIn summoning even the wisest of physicians to our aid, it is probably that he is relying upon a scientific "truth", the error of which will become obvious in just a few years' time.
Marcel ProustWhen I was small child, all that belonged to conservative society was fashionable, and no republicans were welcome in the smartersalons. People living in such a milieu could imagine that the impossibility of ever inviting an "opportunist", much less a "radical", was a thing that would last forever, like gas lamps and horse-drawn omnibuses. But similar to kaleidoscopes turning from time to time, society successively places in various ways elements which were thought to be immutable and creates a new composition.
Marcel ProustThe human plagiarism which is most difficult to avoid, for individuals... is the plagiarism of ourselves.
Marcel ProustDo 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.
Marcel ProustNo days, perhaps, of all our childhood are ever so fully lived as those that we had regarded as not being lived at all: days spent wholly with a favourite book. Everything that seemed to fill them full for others we pushed aside, because it stood between us and the pleasures of the Gods.
Marcel ProustFacts do not find their way into the world in which our beliefs reside; they did not produce our beliefs, they do not destroy them; they may inflict on them the most constant refutations without weakening them, and an avalanche of afflictions or ailments succeeding one another without interruption in a family will not make it doubt the goodness of its God or the talent of its doctor.
Marcel ProustOur shadows, now parallel, now close together and joined, traced an exquisite pattern at our feet.
Marcel ProustWe scornfully decline, because of one whom we love and who will some day be of so little account, to see another who is of no account to-day, with whom we shall be in love to-morrow, with whom we might, perhaps, had we consented to see her now, have fallen in love a little earlier and who would thus have put a term to our present sufferings, bringing others, it is true, in their place.
Marcel ProustLove is not vain because it is frustrated, but because it is fulfilled. The people we love turn to ashes when we posess them.
Marcel ProustWe were resigned to suffering, thinking that we loved outside ourselves, and we perceive that our love is a function of our sorrow, that our love perhaps is our sorrow.
Marcel ProustPerhaps it is not-being that is the true state, and all our dream of life is inexistent; but, if so, we feel that these phrases of music, these conceptions which exist in relation to our dream, must be nothing either. We shall perish, but we have as hostages these divine captives who will follow and share our fate. And death in their company is somehow less bitter, less inglorious, perhaps even less probable.
Marcel ProustWe only really know what is new, what suddenly introduces to our sensibility a change of tone which strikes us, that for which habit has not yet substituted its pale fac-similes.
Marcel ProustIf a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time.
Marcel ProustAn hour is not merely an hour, it is a vase full of scents and sounds and projects and climates.
Marcel Proust