Marcel Proust Quotes - Page 11

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To achieve accurate knowledge of others, if such a thing were possible, we could only ever arrive at it through the slow and unsure recognition of our own initial optical inaccuracies. However, such knowledge is not possible: for, while our vision of others is being adjusted, they, who are not made of mere brute matter, are also changing; we think we have managed to see them more clearly, but they shift; and when we believe we have them fully in focus, it is merely our older images of them that we have clarified, but which are themselves already out of date.

Marcel Proust

Believe, Thinking, Focus

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A 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 Proust

Eye, Flames, Hatred

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I have a horror of sunsets; they're so romantic, so operatic.

Marcel Proust

Sunset, Emotion, Horror

'Sodome et Gomorrhe' (Cities of the Plain, 1922, translated by C. K. Scott-Moncrieff, vol. 1, p. 296)

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In the sort of screen dappled with different states of mind which my consciousness would simultaneously unfold while I read, and which ranged from the aspirations hidden deepest within me to the completely exterior vision of the horizon which I had, at the bottom of the garden, before my eyes, what was first in me, innermost, the constantly moving handle that controlled the rest, was my belief in the philosophical richness and beauty of the book I was reading, and my desire to appropriate them for myself, whatever that book might be.

Marcel Proust

Moving, Book, Philosophical

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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.

Marcel Proust

Fashion, Grace, Prejudice

Marcel Proust (1957). “Pleasures and days: and other writings”

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When a belief vanishes, there survives it -- more and more vigorously so as to cloak the absence of the power, now lost to us, of imparting reality to new things -- a fetishistic attachment to the old things which it did once animate, as if it was in them and not in ourselves that the divine spark resided, and as if our present incredulity had a contingent cause -- the death of the gods.

Marcel Proust

Reality, Attachment, Old Things

Marcel Proust (2000). “In Search of Lost Time, Volume I: Swann's Way (A Modern Library E-Book)”, p.581, Modern Library

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L'ide e qu'on mourra est plus cruelle que mourir, mais moins que l'ide e qu'un autre est mort. The idea of dying is worse than dying itself, but less cruel than the idea that another has died.

Marcel Proust

Ideas, Dying, Plus

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But to ask pity of our body is like discoursing in front of an octopus, for which our words can have no more meaning than the sound of the tides, and with which we should be appalled to find ourselves condemned to live.

Marcel Proust

Octopus, Sound, Our Words

Le Cote de Guermantes (The GuermantesWay) pt. 1 (1921) (translation by C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin)

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There is no man ... however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived a life, the memory of which is so unpleasant to him that he would gladly expunge it. And yet he ought not entirely to regret it, because he cannot be certain that he has indeed become a wise man -- so far as it is possible for any of us to be wise -- unless he has passed through all the fatuous or unwholesome incarnations by which that ultimate stage must be preceded.

Marcel Proust

Wise, Wisdom, Memories

Marcel Proust (2015). “In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower: In Search of Lost Time”, p.481, Yale University Press

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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 Proust

Song, Heart, Law

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...that melancholy which we feel when we cease to obey orders which, from one day to another, keep the future hidden, and realise that we have at last begun to live in real earnest, as a grown-up person, the life, the only life that any of us has at his disposal.

Marcel Proust

Real, Order, One Day

Marcel Proust (2006). “Remembrance of Things Past”, p.281, Wordsworth Editions

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No doubt very few people understand the purely subjective nature of the phenomenon that we call love, or how it creates, so to speak, a supplementary person, distinct from the person whom the world knows by the same name, a person most of whose constituent elements are derived from ourselves.

Marcel Proust

Names, People, Doubt

Marcel Proust (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Marcel Proust (Illustrated)”, p.808, Delphi Classics

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

Marcel Proust

Change, Desire, Literature

Marcel Proust (2006). “Remembrance of Things Past”, p.817, Wordsworth Editions

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A man who falls straight into bed night after night, and ceases to live until the moment when he wakes and rises, will surely never dream of making, I don't say great discoveries, but even minor observations about sleep. He scarcely knows that he is asleep. A little insomnia is not without its value in making us appreciate sleep, in throwing a ray of light upon that darkness.

Marcel Proust

Dream, Fall, Sleep

Marcel Proust (2000). “In Search of Lost Time, Volume IV: Sodom and Gomorrah (A Modern Library E-Book)”, p.69, Modern Library

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The 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 Proust

Art, Reality, Quality

Marcel Proust (1948). “The Maxims of Marcel Proust”

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What we have not had to decipher, to elucidate by our own efforts, what was clear before we looked at it, is not ours. From ourselves comes only that which we drag forth from the obscurity which lies within us, that which to others is unknown.

Marcel Proust

Lying, Effort, Obscurity

Marcel Proust (2000). “In Search of Lost Time, Volume VI: Time Regained (A Modern Library E-Book)”, p.276, Modern Library

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My dear Madame, I just noticed that I forgot my cane at your house yesterday; please be good enough to give it to the bearer of this letter. P.S. Kindly pardon me for disturbing you; I just found my cane.

Marcel Proust

Yesterday, Giving, House

Marcel Proust “Swann’s Way”, W. W. Norton & Company

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L'adolescence est le seul temps o u' l'on ait appris quelque chose. Adolescence is the only time when we can learn something.

Marcel Proust

Adolescence, Only Time

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Let but a single flash of reality -- the glimpse of a woman from afar or from behind -- enable us to project the image of Beauty before our eyes, and we imagine that we have recognised it, our hearts beat, and we will always remain half-persuaded that it was She, provided that the woman has vanished: it is only if we manage to overtake her that we realise our mistake.

Marcel Proust

Mistake, Heart, Eye

Marcel Proust, Charles Kenneth Scott-Moncrieff, Terence Kilmartin, Dennis Joseph Enright (1996). “In Search of Lost Time: Within a budding grove”, Vintage Classics

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How can we have the courage to wish to live, how can we make a movement to preserve ourselves from death, in a world where love is provoked by a lie and consists solely in the need of having our sufferings appeased by whatever being has made us suffer?

Marcel Proust

Lying, Love Is, Suffering

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Physical love, so unjustly decried, forces everyone to manifest even the smallest bits of kindness he possesses, of selflessness,that they shine in the eyes of all who surround him.

Marcel Proust

Sex, Kindness, Eye

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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.

Marcel Proust

Pain, Past, Survival

Marcel Proust (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Marcel Proust (Illustrated)”, p.4860, Delphi Classics

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The truth is that men can have several sorts of pleasure. The true pleasure is the one for which they abandon the other.

Marcel Proust

Men, Truth Is, Pleasure

Marcel Proust (1982). “Remembrance of Things Past: The Guermantes way. Cities of the plain”, Vintage

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For neither our greatest fears nor our greatest hopes are beyond the limits of our strength--we are able in the end both to dominate the first and to achieve the second.

Marcel Proust

Greatest Fear, Able, Limits

Marcel Proust (1970). “The past recaptured”, Random House (NY)

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We 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 Proust

Tone, Introducing, Habit

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Born: July 10, 1871
Died: November 18, 1922
Occupation: Novelist
Cite this Page: Citation

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