Top 500 Marcel Proust Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”

— Marcel Proust

Featured in: Travel Quotes

2. “My destination is no longer a place, rather a new way of seeing.”

— Marcel Proust

Featured in: Destination Quotes

3. “Let us be grateful to people who make us happy, they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.”

— Marcel Proust

4. “Even though our lives wander, our memories remain in one place.”

— Marcel Proust

5. “We don’t receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.”

— Marcel Proust

6. “When you work to please others you can’t succeed, but the things you do to satisfy yourself stand a chance of catching someone’s interest.”

— Marcel Proust

7. “Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.”

— Marcel Proust

Featured in: Quotes About Memories

8. “We are healed from suffering only by experiencing it to the full.”

— Marcel Proust

9. “Always try to keep a patch of sky above your life.”

— Marcel Proust

10. “The only true voyage would be not to travel through a hundred different lands, but to see the same land through a hundred different pairs of eyes.”

— Marcel Proust

11. “Do not wait for life. Do not long for it. Be aware, always and at every moment, that the miracle is in the here and now.”

— Marcel Proust

12. “Every reader finds himself. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.”

— Marcel Proust

Featured in: Book Quotes, Reading Quotes

13. “If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time.”

— Marcel Proust

14. “Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.”

— Marcel Proust

15. “Love is a striking example of how little reality means to us.”

— Marcel Proust

16. “Reading is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.”

— Marcel Proust

Featured in: Reading Quotes, Communication Quotes

17. “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

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

— Marcel Proust

19. “When I am not too sad to listen, music is my consolation.”

— Marcel Proust

20. “There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book.”

— Marcel Proust

Featured in: Book Quotes, Reading Quotes, Quotes About Childhood

21. “Memory nourishes the heart, and grief abates.”

— Marcel Proust

Featured in: Healing Quotes

22. “Often it is just lack of imagination that keeps a man from suffering very much.”

— Marcel Proust

23. “The creation of the world did not occur at the beginning of time, it occurs every day.”

— Marcel Proust

24. “We must never be afraid to go too far, for truth lies beyond.”

— Marcel Proust

25. “No man is a complete mystery except to himself.”

— Marcel Proust

26. “The heart does not lie.”

— Marcel Proust

27. “We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world.”

— Marcel Proust

28. “Like many intellectuals, he was incapable of saying a simple thing in a simple way.”

— Marcel Proust

29. “Love is a reciprocal torture.”

— Marcel Proust

30. “It has been said that beauty is a promise of happiness. Conversely, the possibility of pleasure can be a beginning of beauty.”

— Marcel Proust

31. “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

32. “It is always thus, impelled by a state of mind which is destined not to last, we make our irrevocable decisions.”

— Marcel Proust

33. “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

34. “It is always during a passing state of mind that we make lasting resolutions.”

— Marcel Proust

35. “It comes so soon, the moment when there is nothing left to wait for.”

— Marcel Proust

36. “A change in the weather is sufficient to recreate the world and ourselves.”

— Marcel Proust

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

— Marcel Proust

38. “The fixity of a habit is generally in direct proportion to its absurdity.”

— Marcel Proust

39. “The only thing that does not change is that at any and every time it appears that there have been great changes.”

— Marcel Proust

40. “Now are the woods all black, But still the sky is blue.”

— Marcel Proust

41. “Perhaps the immobility of the things that surround us is forced upon them by our conviction that they are themselves, and not anything else, and by the immobility of our conceptions of them.”

— Marcel Proust

42. “Habit is a second nature which prevents us from knowing the first, of which it has neither the cruelties nor the enchantments.”

— Marcel Proust

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

43. “Even from the simplest, the most realistic point of view, the countries which we long for occupy, at any given moment, a far larger place in our actual life than the country in which we happen to be.”

— Marcel Proust

Featured in: Country Quotes

44. “We may have revolved every possible idea in our minds, and yet the truth has never occurred to us, and it is from without, when we are least expecting it, that it gives us its cruel stab and wounds us forever.”

— Marcel Proust

45. “We think and name in one world, we live and feel in another.”

— Marcel Proust

46. “Human altruism which is not egoism, is sterile.”

— Marcel Proust

47. “Laissons les jolies femmes aux hommes sans imagination. Leave the pretty women for the men without imagination.”

— Marcel Proust

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

— Marcel Proust

49. “Discovery consists not in seeking new lands, but in seeing with new eyes.”

— Marcel Proust

50. “At the heart of our friendly or purely social relations, there lurks a hostility momentarily cured but recurring by fits and starts.”

— Marcel Proust