Marcel Proust Quotes - Page 8

Quotes about:

These dreams reminded me that, since I wished some day to become a writer, it was high time to decide what sort of books I was going to write. But as soon as I asked myself the question, and tried to discover some subject to which I could impart a philosophical significance of infinite value, my mind would stop like a clock, my consciousness would be faced with a blank, I would feel either that I was wholly devoid of talent or perhaps that some malady of the brain was hindering its development.

Marcel Proust

Dream, Book, Philosophical

Marcel Proust (2000). “In Search of Lost Time, Volume I: Swann's Way (A Modern Library E-Book)”, p.251, Modern Library

12 Copy quote
To understand a profound thought is to have, at the moment one understands it, a profound thought oneself; and this demands some effort, a genuine descent to the heart of oneself . . . Only desire and love give us the strength to make this effort. The only books that we truly absorb are those we read with real appetite, after having worked hard to get them, so great had been our need of them.

Marcel Proust

Real, Book, Heart

13 Copy quote
...a writer's works, like the water in an artesian well, mount to a height which is in proportion to the depth to which suffering has penetrated his soul.

Marcel Proust

Water, Soul, Suffering

10 Copy quote
Those whose suffering is due to love are, as we say of certain invalids, their own physicians.

Marcel Proust

Suffering, Physicians, Certain

Marcel Proust (2006). “Remembrance of Things Past”, p.578, Wordsworth Editions

5 Copy quote
We passionately long that there may be another life in which we shall be similar to what we are here below. But we do not pause to reflect that, even without waiting for that other life, in this life, after a few years we are unfaithful to what we have been, to what we wished to remain immortally.

Marcel Proust

Years, Long, Waiting

Marcel Proust (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Marcel Proust (Illustrated)”, p.2893, Delphi Classics

10 Copy quote
The moments of the past do not remain still; they retain in our memory the motion which drew them towards the future, towards a future which has itself become the past, and draw us on in their train.

Marcel Proust

Memories, Past, Moments

Marcel Proust (2015). “Remembrance of Things Past: The Sweet Cheat Gone”, p.64, Marcel Proust

10 Copy quote
We feel in one world, we think and name in another. Between the two we can set up a system of references, but we cannot fill in the gap.

Marcel Proust

Life, Thinking, Names

7 Copy quote
Masterpieces are no more than the shipwrecked flotsam of great minds.

Marcel Proust

Mind, Great Minds, Flotsam

Marcel Proust (1958). “By Way of Sainte-Beuve: (Contre Sainte-Beuve)”

10 Copy quote
In theory one is aware that the earth revolves, but in practice one does not perceive it, the ground upon which one treads seems not to move, and one can live undisturbed. So it is with Time in one's life.

Marcel Proust

Life, Time, Moving

Marcel Proust (2016). “In Search of Lost Time: Or “Á la Recherche du temps perdu””, p.466, Jester House Publishing

14 Copy quote
Our words are, as a general rule, filled by the people to whom we address them with a meaning which those people derive from their own substance, a meaning widely different from that which we had put into the same words when we uttered them.

Marcel Proust

People, Different, Our Words

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

6 Copy quote
Only imagination and belief can differentiate from the rest certain objects, certain people, and can create an atmosphere.

Marcel Proust

Imagination, People, Atmosphere

Marcel Proust (2016). “In Search of Lost Time: Or “Á la Recherche du temps perdu””, p.922, Jester House Publishing

4 Copy quote
Habit is, of all the plants of human growth, the one that has the least need of nutritious soil in order to live, and is the first to appear on the most seemingly barren rock.

Marcel Proust

Rocks, Order, Growth

Marcel Proust (2000). “In Search of Lost Time, Volume III: The Guermantes Way”, p.152, Modern Library

4 Copy quote
For, just as in the beginning it is formed by desire, so afterwards love is kept in existence only by painful anxiety.

Marcel Proust

Love Is, Anxiety, Desire

Marcel Proust (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Marcel Proust (Illustrated)”, p.3648, Delphi Classics

6 Copy quote
There is in this world in which everything wears out, everything perishes, one thing that crumbles into dust, that destroys itself still more completely, leaving behind still fewer traces of itself than Beauty: namely Grief.

Marcel Proust

Grief, Dust, Leaving

Marcel Proust (2016). “In Search of Lost Time: Or “Á la Recherche du temps perdu””, p.2508, Jester House Publishing

11 Copy quote
Life is extraordinarily suave and sweet with certain natural, witty, affectionate people who have unusual distinction and are capable of every vice, but who make a display of none in public and about whom no one can affirm they have a single one. There is something supple and secret about them. Besides, their perversity gives spice to their most innocent occupations, such as taking a walk in the garden at night.

Marcel Proust

Witty, Sweet, Night

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

27 Copy quote
Every kiss provokes another. Oh, in those earliest days of love how naturally the kisses spring to life! So closely, in their profusion, do they crowd together that lovers would find it as hard to count the kisses exchanged in an hour as to count the flowers in a meadow in May.

Marcel Proust

Spring, Flower, Kissing

8 Copy quote
Laissons les jolies femmes aux hommes sans imagination. Leave the pretty women for the men without imagination.

Marcel Proust

Men, Imagination, Pretty Woman

1925 A' la recherche du temps perdu,'Albertine disparue'.

6 Copy quote
We are ordinarily so indifferent to people that when we have invested one of them with the possibility of giving us joy, or suffering, it seems as if he must belong to some other universe, he is imbued with poetry.

Marcel Proust

Love, People, Giving

7 Copy quote
Until I saw Chardin's painting, I never realized how much beauty lay around me in my parents' house, in the half-cleared table, in the corner of a tablecloth left awry, in the knife beside the empty oyster shell.

Marcel Proust

Oysters, Knives, Parent

6 Copy quote
The duty and the task of a writer are those of an interpreter.

Marcel Proust

Tasks, Duty, Interpreter

Marcel Proust (2016). “In Search of Lost Time: Or “Á la Recherche du temps perdu””, p.2669, Jester House Publishing

8 Copy quote
All the great things we know have come to us from neurotics. It is they who have founded religions and created great works of art.

Marcel Proust

Art, Great Work, Great Things

5 Copy quote
When we have passed a certain age, the soul of the child we were and the souls of the dead from whom we have sprung come to lavish on us their riches and their spells.

Marcel Proust

Children, Soul, Age

7 Copy quote
Our passions shape our books, repose writes them in the intervals.

Marcel Proust

Book, Passion, Writing

Marcel Proust (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Marcel Proust (Illustrated)”, p.4867, Delphi Classics

10 Copy quote
We can sometimes find a person again, but we cannot abolish time. And so on until the unforeseen day, gloomy as a winter night, when one no longer seeks that girl, or any other, when to find her would actually scare one. For one no longer feels that one has attractions enough to please, or strength enough to love. Not, of course, that one is in the strict sense of the word impotent. And as for loving, one would love more than ever. But one feels that it is too big an undertaking for the little strength one has left.

Marcel Proust

Girl, Winter, Night

Marcel Proust (2000). “In Search of Lost Time, Volume IV: Sodom and Gomorrah (A Modern Library E-Book)”, p.348, Modern Library

7 Copy quote
So we don't believe that life is beautiful because we don't recall it but if we get a whiff of a long-forgotten smell we are suddenly intoxicated and similarly we think we no longer love the dead because we don't remember them but if by chance we come across an old glove we burst into tears.

Marcel Proust

Beautiful, Believe, Thinking

Marcel Proust, Philip Kolb (1992). “Marcel Proust, Selected Letters: 1910-1917”, HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

13 Copy quote

You May Also Like:

Gustave Flaubert

Honore de Balzac

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Jean-Paul Sartre

Marcel Proust

Follow

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

Popular Topics