Marcel Proust Quotes - Page 14

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The fact of the matter is that, since we are determined always to keep our feelings to ourselves, we have never given any thought to the manner in which we should express them. And suddenly there is within us a strange and obscene animal making itself heard, whose tones may inspire as much alarm in the person who receives the involuntary, elliptical and almost irresistible communication of one's defect or vice as would the sudden avowal indirectly and outlandishly proffered by a criminal who can no longer refrain from confessing to a murder of which one had never imagined him to be guilty.

Marcel Proust

Communication, Animal, Inspire

Marcel Proust (2000). “In Search of Lost Time, Volume III: The Guermantes Way”, p.257, Modern Library

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Less disappointing than life, great works of art do not begin by giving us all their best.

Marcel Proust

Life, Art, Disappointment

Marcel Proust (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Marcel Proust (Illustrated)”, p.863, Delphi Classics

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As soon as he ceased to be mad he became merely stupid. There are maladies we must not seek to cure because they alone protect us from others that are more serious.

Marcel Proust

Stupid, Mad, Disease

Marcel Proust (2016). “In Search of Lost Time: Or “Á la Recherche du temps perdu””, p.1162, Jester House Publishing

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There is probably not one person, however great his virtue, who cannot be led by the complexities of life's circumstances to a familiarity with the vices he condemns the most vehemently--without his completely recognizing this vice which, disguised as certain events, touches him and wounds him: strange words, an inexplicable attitude, on a given night, of the person whom he otherwise has so many reasons to love.

Marcel Proust

Attitude, Night, Tolerance

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At that time, he was satisfying a sensual curiosity by experiencing the pleasures of people who live for love. He had believed he could stop there, that he would not be obliged to learn their sorrows; how small a thing her charm was for him now compared with the astounding terror that extended out from it like a murky halo, the immense anguish of not knowing at every moment what she had been doing, of not possessing her everywhere and always!

Marcel Proust

Knowing, People, Sensual

Marcel Proust (2003). “In Search of Lost Time: The Way by Swann's”, p.369, Penguin UK

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When I went to Venice I found that my dream had become-incredibly, but quite simply-my address.

Marcel Proust

Dream, Venice, Addresses

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Everything that seems imperishable tends to extinguishment.

Marcel Proust

Seems

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And so when studying faces, we do indeed measure them, but as painters, not as surveyors.

Marcel Proust

Faces, Study, Appearance

Marcel Proust (2000). “In Search of Lost Time, Volume II: Within a Budding Grove (A Modern Library E-Book)”, p.621, Modern Library

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Indeed, among the lesser auxiliaries to success in love, an absence, the declining of an invitation to dinner, an unintentional, unconscious harshness are of more service than all the cosmetics and fine clothes in the world.

Marcel Proust

Fashion, Clothes, World

Marcel Proust (2016). “The Guermantes Way”, p.461, Marcel Proust

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We shall see later on that the diversity of the forms of death that circulate invisibly is the cause of the peculiar unexpectedness of obituary notices in the newspapers.

Marcel Proust

Death, Diversity, Peculiar

Marcel Proust (2000). “In Search of Lost Time, Volume IV: Sodom and Gomorrah (A Modern Library E-Book)”, p.327, Modern Library

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Similarly the men who produce works of genius are not those who live in the most delicate atmosphere, whose conversation is most brilliant, or their culture broadest, but those who have had the power, ceasing in a moment to live only for themselves, to make use of their personality as of a mirror.

Marcel Proust

Character, Men, Mirrors

Marcel Proust (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Marcel Proust (Illustrated)”, p.884, Delphi Classics

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Now 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 Proust

Pain, Eye, Love Is

Marcel Proust (1981). “Remembrance of Things Past: Swann's way. Within a budding grove”, New York : Random House

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People who, not being in love themselves, feel that a clever man should only be unhappy about a person who is worth his while; which is rather like being astonished that anyone should condescend to die of cholera at the bidding of so insignificant a creature as the comma bacillus.

Marcel Proust

Clever, Being In Love, Men

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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I find very reasonable the Celtic belief that the souls of our dearly departed are trapped in some inferior being, in an animal, aplant, an inanimate object, indeed lost to us until the day, which for some never arrives, when we find that we pass near the tree, or come to possess the object which is their prison. Then they quiver, call us, and as soon as we have recognized them, the spell is broken. Freed by us, they have vanquished death and return to live with us.

Marcel Proust

Death, Animal, Broken

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The soldier is convinced that a certain indefinitely extendable time period is accorded him before he is killed, the burglar before he is caught, men in general, before they must die. That is the amulet which preserves individuals — and sometimes populations — not from danger, but from the fear of danger, in reality from the belief in danger, which in some cases allows them to brave it without being brave. Such a confidence, just as unfounded, supports the lover who counts on a reconciliation, a letter.

Marcel Proust

Reality, Men, Support

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To a great extent, suffering is a sort of need felt by the organism to make itself familiar with a new state, which makes it uneasy, to adapt its sensibility to that state.

Marcel Proust

Suffering, Needs, States

Marcel Proust (2006). “Remembrance of Things Past”, p.1127, Wordsworth Editions

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None of us constitutes a material whole, identical for everyone, which a person has only to go look up as though we were a book of specifications or a last testament; our social personality is a creation of the minds of others. Even the very simple act that we call "seeing a person we know" is in part an intellectual one. We fill the physical appearance of the individual we see with all the notions we have about him, and of the total picture that we form for ourselves, these notions certainly occupy the greater part.

Marcel Proust

Book, Simple, Personality

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For often I have wished to see a person again without realising that it was simply because that personal recalled to me a hedge of hawthorns in blossom, and I have been led to believe, and to make someone else believe, in a renewal of affection, by what was no more than an inclination to travel.

Marcel Proust

Believe, Affection, Renewal

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There is not a woman in the world the possession of whom is as precious as that of the truths which she reveals to us by causing us to suffer.

Marcel Proust

Truth, Suffering, World

Marcel Proust (2006). “Remembrance of Things Past”, p.854, Wordsworth Editions

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For a long time I would go to bed early.
[Fr., Longtemps, je me suis couche de bonne heure.]

Marcel Proust

Book, Long, Bed

Marcel Proust (2003). “In Search of Lost Time: The Way by Swann's”, ePenguin

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There was nothing abnormal about it when homosexuality was the norm.

Marcel Proust

Abnormal, Homosexuality, Normal And Abnormal

1921A' la recherche du temps perdu,'Sodome et Gomorrhe'.

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Unkind people imagine themselves to be inflicting pain on someone equally unkind.

Marcel Proust

Pain, People, Imagine

Marcel Proust (2003). “The Guermantes way”, ePenguin

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Poets claim that we recapture for a moment the self that we were long ago when we enter some house or garden in which we used to live in our youth. But these are most hazardous pilgrimages, which end as often in disappointment as in success. It is in ourselves that we should rather seek to find those fixed places, contemporaneous with different years.

Marcel Proust

Disappointment, Garden, Self

Marcel Proust (2000). “In Search of Lost Time, Volume III: The Guermantes Way”, p.112, Modern Library

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On devient moral de' s qu'on est malheureux. We become moral once we are miserable.

Marcel Proust

Moral, Miserable

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Born: July 10, 1871
Died: November 18, 1922
Occupation: Novelist
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