Top 500 Marcel Proust Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “But what revealed to me all of a sudden the Princess’s love was a trifling incident upon which I shall not dwell here, for it forms part of quite another story, in which M. de Charlus allowed a Queen to die rather than miss an appointment with the hairdresser who was to singe his hair for the benefit of an omnibus conductor who filled him with alarm.”

— Marcel Proust

452. “Were it not for habit, life would seem delightful to beings constantly under threat of dying, in other words to all humankind.”

— Marcel Proust

453. “How often is not the prospect of future happiness thus sacrificed to one’s impatient insistence upon an immediate gratification.”

— Marcel Proust

454. “The most familiar precepts are not always the truest.”

— Marcel Proust

455. “Of these multiple impressions our memory is not capable of furnishing us with an immediate picture. But that picture gradually takes shape, and, with regard to works which we have heard more than once, we are like the schoolboy who has read several times over before going to sleep a lesson which he supposed himself not to know, and finds that he can repeat it by heart next morning.”

— Marcel Proust

456. “So that every fresh encounter is a sort of rectification, which brings us back to what we really did see. We have no longer any recollection of this, to such an extent does what we call remembering a person consist really in forgetting him.”

— Marcel Proust

457. “If the theater is the refuge of the conversationalist whose friend is mute and whose mistress is insipid, then conversation, even the most exquisite, is the pleasure of men without imagination.”

— Marcel Proust

458. “I had long since given up trying to extract from a woman as it were the square root of her unknown quantity, the mystery of which a mere introduction was generally enough to dispel.”

— Marcel Proust

459. “Saddened by the misfortune of the Jews, remembering his friendship with Christians, increasingly mannered and affected as time went on for reasons to be revealed in due course, he now looked like a pre-Raphaelite worm on to which hairs had been indecently grafted, like threads in the depths of an opal.”

— Marcel Proust

460. “The mistakes of doctors are innumerable. They err as a rule out of optimism as to the treatment, and pessimism as to the outcome.”

— Marcel Proust

461. “M. de Charlus made no reply and looked as if he had not heard, which was one of his favourite forms of rudeness.”

— Marcel Proust

462. “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; they can inflict on them continual blows of contradiction and disproof without weakening them; and an avalanche of miseries and maladies succeeding one another without interruption in the bosom of a family will not make it lose faith in either the clemency of its God or the capacity of its physician.”

— Marcel Proust

463. “A child who has been breathing since birth without ever noticing it does not know how essential the unheeded air that gently swells his chest is to his life. Does he happen to be suffocating in a convulsion, a bout of fever? Desperately straining his entire being, he struggles almost for his life, for his lost tranquillity, which he will regain only with the air from which he did not realize his tranquillity was inseparable.”

— Marcel Proust

464. “I do find it absurd that a man of his intelligence should suffer over a person of that sort, who isn’t even interesting – because they say she’s an idiot,” she added with the wisdom of people not in love who believe a man of sense should be unhappy only over a person who is worth it; which is rather like being surprised that anyone should condescend to suffer from cholera because of so small a creature as the comma bacillus.”

— Marcel Proust

465. “At that moment, noticing that his embroidered handkerchief was revealing part of its coloured edging, he thrust it back into his pocket with a startled glance, like a prudish but not innocent woman concealing bodily charms which in her excessive modesty she sees as wanton.”

— Marcel Proust

466. “A fashionable milieu is one in which each person’s opinion is made up of everyone else’s opinions. Does each opinion run counter to everyone else’s? Then it is a literary milieu.”

— Marcel Proust

467. “The humanist, who read too much, ate too much. He quoted and burped, and these two complaints were equally repugnant to his neighbor, a self-made aristocrat, Madame Lenoir.”

— Marcel Proust

468. “For regret, like desire, seeks not to analyse but to gratify itself. When one begins to love, one spends one’s time, not in getting to know what one’s love really is, but in arranging for tomorrow’s rendezvous.”

— Marcel Proust

469. “A work in which there are theories is like an object upon which the price is marked.”

— Marcel Proust

470. “The two chief causes of error in our relations with another person are, having ourselves a good heart, or else being in love with the other person.”

— Marcel Proust

471. “Unfortunately, in the social as in the political world, the victims are such cowards that one cannot for long remain indignant with their executioners.”

— Marcel Proust

472. “The habit of thinking prevents us at times from experiencing reality, immunises us against it, makes it seem no more than any other thought.”

— Marcel Proust

473. “If we press for a definition of what their admirers mean by the epithet, we shall find that it is generally applied to some unusual picture of a familiar object, a picture different from those that we are accustomed to see, unusual and yet true to nature, and for that reason doubly impressive to us because it startles us, makes us emerge from our habits and at the same time brings us back to ourselves by recalling to us an earlier impression.”

— Marcel Proust

474. “Desiring a will was not enough. I would have needed precisely what I could not have without willpower: a will.”

— Marcel Proust

475. “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

476. “And then, while she was making them some orangeade, suddenly, just as when the reflector of a lamp that is badly fitted begins by casting all round an object, on the wall beyond it, huge and fantastic shadows which, in time, contract and are lost in the shadow of the object itself, all the terrible and disturbing ideas which he had formed of Odette melted away and vanished in the charming creature who stood there before his eyes.”

— Marcel Proust

477. “Lying is essential to humanity. It plays as large a part perhaps as the quest for pleasure, and is moreover governed by that quest. One lies in order to protect one’s pleasure, or one’s honour if the disclosure of one’s pleasure runs counter to one’s honour. One lies all one’s life long, even, especially, perhaps only, to those who love one. For they alone make us fear for our pleasure and desire their esteem.”

— Marcel Proust

478. “Like a swimmer who throws himself into the water in order to learn, but chooses a moment when there are not too many people to see him.”

— Marcel Proust

479. “I never allow myself to be influenced in the smallest degree either by atmospheric disturbances or by the arbitrary divisions of what is known as Time.”

— Marcel Proust

480. “For everyone who, having no artistic sense-that is to say, no submission to subjective reality-may have the knack of reasoning about art till doomsday, especially if he be, in addition, a diplomat or financier in contact with the ‘realities’ of the present day, is only too ready to believe literature is an intellectual game which is destined to gradually be abandoned as time goes on.”

— Marcel Proust

481. “But she was wrong; it was what gave her away; she had not taken into account that this fragmentary detail of the truth had sharp edges which could not be made to fit in, except to those contiguous fragments of the truth from which she had arbitrarily detached it, edges which, whatever the fictitious details in which she might embed it, would continue to shew, by their overlapping angles and by the gaps which she had forgotten to fill, that its proper place was elsewhere.”

— Marcel Proust

482. “Every woman feels that the greater her power over a man, the more impossible it is to leave him except by sudden flight: a fugitive precisely because a queen.”

— Marcel Proust

483. “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

484. “In the V-shaped opening of her crape bodice Mlle. Vinteuil felt the sting of her friend’s sudden kiss;...”

— Marcel Proust

485. “There is in woman something of the unconscious function of drugs which are cunning without knowing it, like morphine.”

— Marcel Proust

486. “For the possession of what we love is an even greater joy than love itself.”

— Marcel Proust

487. “In vain the young man gave him details of all his obscenities with his women, M. de Charlus was only struck by how little they amounted to. For that matter that was not only the result of insincerity, for nothing is more limited than vice. In that sense one can really use a common expression and say that one is always turning in the same vicious circle.”

— Marcel Proust

488. “I did not wait to hear the end of my father’s story, for I had been with him myself after mass when we had met M. Legrandin; instead, I went downstairs to the kitchen to ask about the menu for our dinner, which was of fresh interest to me daily, like the news in a paper, and excited me as might the programme of a coming festivity.”

— Marcel Proust

489. “My life had been like a painter who climbs up a road overhanging a lake that is hidden from view by a screen of rocks and trees. Through a gap he glimpses it, he has it all there in front of him, he takes up his brushes.”

— Marcel Proust

490. “Her memory was a burning pillow which she kept turning and turning.”

— Marcel Proust

491. “And continued to regard all their absurdities in the most rosy light through the admiring eyes of love.”

— Marcel Proust

492. “Pleasures are like photographs: in the presence of the person we love, we take only negatives, which we develop later, at home, when we have at our disposal once more our inner dark room, the door of which it is strictly forbidden to open while others are present.”

— Marcel Proust

493. “I had spent the New Year’s Day of old men, who differ on that day from their juniors, not because people have ceased to give them presents but because they themselves have ceased to believe in the New Year.”

— Marcel Proust

494. “Repeatedly, I dare say, when pretty girls went by, I had promised myself that I would see them again. As a rule, people do not appear a second time; moreover our memory, which speedily forgets their existence, would find it difficult to recall their appearance; our eyes would not recognise them, perhaps, and in the meantime we have seen new girls go by, whom we shall not see again either.”

— Marcel Proust

495. “As by an electric current that gives us a shock, I have been shaken by my loves, I have lived them, I have felt them: never have I succeeded in seeing or thinking them.”

— Marcel Proust

496. “It is not only by dint of lying to others, but also of lying to ourselves, that we cease to notice that we are lying.”

— Marcel Proust

497. “The paradoxes of today are the prejudices of tomorrow.”

— Marcel Proust

498. “But I consoled myself with the reflexion that in spite of everything she was for me the real point of intersection between reality and dream.”

— Marcel Proust

499. “No sooner does an approaching hour become the present for us than it sheds all its charms, only to regain them, it is true, on the roads of memory, when we have left that hour far behind us, and so long as our soul is vast enough to disclose deep perspectives.”

— Marcel Proust

500. “I did not distinguish the successive theories of which that uncertainty was composed any more than, when we watch a horse running, we isolate the successive positions of its body as they appear upon a bioscope. But.”

— Marcel Proust