Marcel Proust Quotes - Page 17

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A man may have spent his life among the great ones of the earth, who to him have been merely boring relatives or tedious acquaintances because a familiarity engendered in the cradle had stripped them of all glamour in his eyes.

Marcel Proust

Eye, Men, Earth

Marcel Proust (2000). “In Search of Lost Time, Volume IV: Sodom and Gomorrah (A Modern Library E-Book)”, p.346, Modern Library

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A language which we do not know is a fortress sealed.

Marcel Proust

Language, Fortresses, Knows

Marcel Proust (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Marcel Proust (Illustrated)”, p.909, Delphi Classics

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L'adulte' re introduit l'esprit dans la lettre quebien souvent le mariage e u" t laisse e morte. Adultery breathes new life into marriages which have been left for dead.

Marcel Proust

New Life, Adultery, Breathe

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Habit! that skilful but slow-moving arranger who begins by letting our minds suffer for weeks on end in temporary quarters, but whom our minds are none the less only too happy to discover at last, for without it, reduced to their own devices, they would be powerless to make any room seem habitable.

Marcel Proust

Moving, Mind, Suffering

Marcel Proust (2015). “Swann's Way”, p.9, Vintage

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True variety is in that plenitude of real and unexpected elements, in the branch charged with blue flowers thrusting itself, against all expectations, from the springtime hedge which seems already too full, while the purely formal imitation of varietyis but void and uniformity, that is, that which is most opposed to variety.

Marcel Proust

Art, Real, Flower

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I blame the newspapers because every day they call our attention to insignificant things, while three or four times in our lives,we read books that contain essential things. Once we feverishly tear the band of paper enclosing our newspapers, things should change and we should find--I do not know--the Pensées by Pascal!

Marcel Proust

Book, Knowledge, Insignificant Things

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This labour of the artist to discover a means of apprehending beneath matter and experience, beneath words, something different from their appearance, is of an exactly contrary nature to the operation in which pride, passion, intelligence and habit are constantly engaged within us when we spend our lives without self-communion, accumulating as though to hide our true impressions, the terminology for practical ends which we falsely call life.

Marcel Proust

Passion, Mean, Pride

Marcel Proust (1949). “Remembrance of Things Past: Time regained”

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... But all the feelings that evoke in us the joy or the misfortune of a real person are only produced in us through the intermediary of an image of that joy or that misfortune; the ingeniousness of the first novelist was in understanding that, in the apparatus of our emotions, since the image is the only essential element, the simplification which consists of purely and simply suppressing the factual characters is a definitive improvement.

Marcel Proust

Real, Character, Joy

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Griefs, at the moment when they change into ideas, lose some of their power to injure our heart.

Marcel Proust

Grief, Heart, Ideas

Marcel Proust (2000). “In Search of Lost Time, Volume VI: Time Regained (A Modern Library E-Book)”, p.315, Modern Library

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The particulars of life do not matter to the artist; they merely provide him with the opportunity to lay bare his genius.

Marcel Proust

Art, Opportunity, Genius

Marcel Proust (2000). “In Search of Lost Time, Volume II: Within a Budding Grove (A Modern Library E-Book)”, p.509, Modern Library

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...Hard people are weak people whom nobody wants, and the strong, caring little whether they are wanted or not, have alone that meekness which the common herd mistake for weakness.

Marcel Proust

Strong, Mistake, Caring

Marcel Proust (2016). “Sodom et Gomorrhe”, p.544, Marcel Proust

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La me decine a fait quelques petits progre' s dans ses connaissances depuis Molie' re, mais aucun dans son vocabulaire. Medicine has made a few, small advances in knowledge since Molie' r e, but none in its vocabulary.

Marcel Proust

Son, Vocabulary, Medicine

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That which we remember of our conduct is ignored by our closest neighbour; but that which we have forgotten having said, or even what we never said, will cause laughter even into the next world.

Marcel Proust

Laughter, World, Next

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People can have many different kinds of pleasure. The real one is that for which they will forsake the others.

Marcel Proust

Real, People, Different

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What a profound significance small things assume when the woman we love conceals them from us.

Marcel Proust

Love, Profound, Literature

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The charms of the passing woman are generally in direct ratio to the swiftness of our passage.

Marcel Proust

Literature, Swiftness, Charm

"In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower: In Search of Lost Time".

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Man is the creature that cannot emerge from himself, that knows his fellows only in himself; when he asserts the contrary, he is lying.

Marcel Proust

Lying, Men, Self

Marcel Proust (2015). “Remembrance of Things Past: The Sweet Cheat Gone”, p.30, Marcel Proust

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The sensitiveness claimed by neurotic is matched by their egotism: they cannot abide the flaunting by others of the sufferings to which they pay an even increasing amount of attention in themselves.

Marcel Proust

Suffering, Attention, Neurosis

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Words do not change their meanings so drastically in the course of centuries as, in our minds, names do in the course of a year or two.

Marcel Proust

Years, Names, Two

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On ne re c° oit pas la sagesse, il faut la de couvrir soi-me" me, apre' s un trajet que personne ne peut faire pour nous, ne peut nous e pargner. We do not receive wisdom.We must discover it ourselves after experiences which no one else can have for us and from which no one else can spare us.

Marcel Proust

Spares

1919 A' la recherche du temps perdu,'A' l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs'.

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There is probably no one, however rigid his virtue, who is not liable to find himself, by the complexity of circumstances, living at close quarters with the very vice which he himself has been most outspoken in condemning -- without altogether recognizing it beneath the disguise of ambiguous behavior which it assumes in his presence.

Marcel Proust

Vices, Assuming, Virtue

Marcel Proust, Dennis Joseph Enright (1992). “In Search of Lost Time: Swann's way”, Vintage

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The facts of life do not penetrate to the sphere in which our beliefs are cherished; they did not engender those beliefs, and they are powerless to destroy them.

Marcel Proust

Facts, Spheres, Belief

Marcel Proust (2000). “In Search of Lost Time, Volume I: Swann's Way (A Modern Library E-Book)”, p.219, Modern Library

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We 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 Proust

Love Is, Thinking, Suffering

Marcel Proust (2016). “In Search of Lost Time: Or “Á la Recherche du temps perdu””, p.1981, Jester House Publishing

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Certain favourite roles are played by us so often before the public and rehearsed so carefully when we are alone that we find it easier to refer to their fictitious testimony than to that of a reality which we have almost entirely forgotten.

Marcel Proust

Reality, Roles, Forgotten

Marcel Proust (2000). “In Search of Lost Time, Volume II: Within a Budding Grove (A Modern Library E-Book)”, p.206, Modern Library

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The features of our face are hardly more than gestures which force of habit made permanent. Nature, like the destruction of Pompeii, like the metamorphosis of a nymph into a tree, has arrested us in an accustomed movement.

Marcel Proust

Nature, Nymphs, Tree

Marcel Proust (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Marcel Proust (Illustrated)”, p.1194, Delphi Classics

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