Marcel Proust Quotes - Page 16

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Reading 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 Proust

Spiritual, Reading, Discipline

"On Reading".

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Conversation, which is friendship's mode of expression, is a superficial digression which gives us nothing worth acquiring. We may talk for a lifetime without doing more than indefinitely repeat the vacuity of a minute.

Marcel Proust

Expression, Giving, May

Marcel Proust (2000). “In Search of Lost Time, Volume II: Within a Budding Grove (A Modern Library E-Book)”, p.575, Modern Library

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The reason why a work of genius is not easily admired from the first is that the man who has created it is extraordinary, that few other men resemble him. It is his work itself that, by fertilising the rare minds capable of understanding it, will make them increase and multiply.

Marcel Proust

Men, Understanding, Mind

Marcel Proust (2000). “In Search of Lost Time, Volume II: Within a Budding Grove (A Modern Library E-Book)”, p.130, Modern Library

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Facts 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 Proust

Doctors, Doubt, World

Marcel Proust, James Grieve, Mark Treharne, John Sturrock, Carol E. Clark (2002). “In Search of Lost Time: Way by Swann's”

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Wars are fought for the benefit of oligarchs, triumphs bought with the blood of peons.

Marcel Proust

War, Blood, Benefits

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When one becomes for an instant one's former self, that is to say different from what one has been for some time past, one's sensibility, being no longer dulled by habit, receives from the slightest stimulus vivid impressions which make everything that has preceded them fade into insignificance, impressions to which, because of their intensity, we attach ourselves with the momentary enthusiasm of a drunkard.

Marcel Proust

Past, Self, Different

Marcel Proust (2000). “In Search of Lost Time, Volume IV: Sodom and Gomorrah (A Modern Library E-Book)”, p.537, Modern Library

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Knowing does not always allow us to prevent, but at least the things that we know, we hold them, if not in our hands, but at leastin our thoughts where we may dispose of them at our whim, which gives us the illusion of power over them.

Marcel Proust

Thoughtful, Power, Thinking

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It is the tragedy of other people that they are to us merely showcases for the very perishable collections of our own mind.

Marcel Proust

People, Mind, Tragedy

Marcel Proust (2015). “Remembrance of Things Past: The Sweet Cheat Gone”, p.123, Marcel Proust

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What an abyss of uncertainty, whenever the mind feels overtaken by itself; when it, the seeker, is at the same time the dark region through which it must go seeking and where all its equipment will avail it nothing. Seek? More than that: create. It is face to face with something which does not yet exist, which it alone can make actual, which it alone can bring into the light of day.

Marcel Proust

Dark, Light, Mind

Marcel Proust (2015). “Swann's Way”, p.49, Vintage

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It is up to my spirit to find the truth. But how? Grave uncertainty, each time the spirit feels beyond its own comprehension; whenit, the explorer, is altogether to obscure land that it must search and where all its baggage is of no use. To search? That is not all: to create.

Marcel Proust

Creativity, Knowledge, Land

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They like my books better in England than in France; a translation would be very successful there.

Marcel Proust

Book, Reading, Successful

Marcel Proust (1966). “Letters of Marcel Proust”

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It seems that certain transcendental realities emit rays to which the masses are sensitive. That is how, for example, when an event takes place, when at the front an army is in danger, or defeated, or victorious, the rather obscure news which the cultivated man does not quite understand, excite in the masses an emotion which surprises him and in which, once the experts have informed him of the actual military situation, he recognizes the populace's perception of that "aura" surrounding great events and visible for hundreds of kilometers.

Marcel Proust

Military, War, Army

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Even the simple act that we call "going to visit a person of our acquaintance" is in part an intellectual act. We fill the physical appearance of the person we see with all the notions we have about him, and in the totality of our impressions about him, these notions play the most important role.

Marcel Proust

Simple, Play, Intellectual

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We 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 Proust

Suffering, Littles, Might

Marcel Proust (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Marcel Proust (Illustrated)”, p.949, Delphi Classics

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We say that we often see animals in our dreams, but we forget that almost always we are ourselves animals therein, deprived of that reasoning power which projects upon things the light of certainty; on the contrary we bring to bear on the spectacle of life only a dubious vision, extinguished anew every moment by oblivion, the former reality fading before that which follows it as one projection of a magic lantern fades before the next as we change the slide.

Marcel Proust

Dream, Animal, Reality

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

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You know Balbec so well - do you have friends in the area?' I have friends wherever there are companies of trees, wounded but not vanquished, which huddle together with touching obstinacy to implore an inclement and pitiless sky.' That is not what I meant,' interrupted my father, as obstinate as the trees and as pitiless as the sky.

Marcel Proust

Father, Sky, Tree

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

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People who laugh so heartily at what they themselves have said, when it is not funny, dispense us accordingly, by taking upon themselves the responsibility for the mirth, from joining in it.

Marcel Proust

Responsibility, Joining In, People

Marcel Proust (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Marcel Proust (Illustrated)”, p.2760, Delphi Classics

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Do you suppose that it is within your power to insult me? You evidently are not aware to whom you are speaking? Do you imagine that the envenomed spittle of five hundred little gentlemen of your type, heaped one upon another, would succeed in slobbering so much as the tips of my august toes?

Marcel Proust

August, Gentleman, Littles

Marcel Proust (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Marcel Proust (Illustrated)”, p.2149, Delphi Classics

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If, I can someday see M. Claude Monet's garden, I feel sure that I shall see something that is not so much a garden of flowers as of colours and tones, less an old-fashioned flower garden than a colour garden, so to speak, one that achieves an effect not entirely nature's, because it was planted so that only the flowers with matching colours will bloom at the same time, harmonized in an infinite stretch of blue or pink.

Marcel Proust

Nature, Flower, Garden

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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.

Marcel Proust

Memories, Hands, Drug

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Le bonheur est dans l'amour un e tat anormal. In love, happiness is abnormal.

Marcel Proust

Abnormal, Amour, L Amour

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There are people whose faces assume an unaccustomed beauty and majesty the moment they cease to look out of their eyes.

Marcel Proust

Eye, People, Looks

Marcel Proust (1982). “Remembrance of Things Past: The captive. The fugitive. Time regained”, Vintage

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Most of the supposed expressions of our feelings merely relieve us of them by drawing them out of us in an indistinct form that does not teach us to know them.

Marcel Proust

Expression, Drawing, Feelings

Marcel Proust (2003). “Swann's Way”, Viking Press

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Pour e crire ce livre essentiel, le seul livre vrai, un grand e crivain n'a pas, dans le sens courant, a' l'inventer puisqu'il existe de j a' en chacun de nous, mais a' le traduire. To write the essential book, the only true book, a great writerdoesnot needto invent becausethebook already exists inside each one of us and merely needs translation.

Marcel Proust

Book, Writing, Essentials

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The stellar universe is not so difficult to understand as the real actions of other people, especially of the people with whom we are in love.

Marcel Proust

Love, Real, People

Marcel Proust (2016). “THE PRISONER: A Masterpiece Exploring the Intricacies of Human Nature and Relationships (In Search of Lost Time Series)”, p.173, e-artnow

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

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