Top 500 Marcel Proust Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “She tried to persuade them to confine their tributes to flowers and sweets, which had at least the merit of mortality; but she was never successful, and the house was gradually filled with a collection of foot-warmers, cushions, clocks, screens, barometers and vases, a constant repetition and a boundless incongruity of useless but indestructible objects.”

— Marcel Proust

452. “After the suicide of my thoughts, they admired my intelligence; they doted on my mind. My parched imagination, my dried-up sensitivity were enough for the people who were the thirstiest for an intellectual life – their thirst being as artificial and mendacious as the source from which they believed they were quenching it!”

— Marcel Proust

453. “The truth is that as we grow older we kill all those who love us by the cares we give them, by the anxious tenderness we inspire in them and constantly arouse.”

— Marcel Proust

454. “We see things but we don’t see them, like things that slid through the mind, one flowing into another.”

— Marcel Proust

455. “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

456. “For often I have wished to see a person again without realising that it was simply because that personal recalled to me a hedge of hawthorns in blossom, and I have been led to believe, and to make someone else believe, in a renewal of affection, by what was no more than an inclination to travel.”

— Marcel Proust

457. “No doubt, having developed the habit, out of idleness, of each day putting off my work until the day after, I thought that death could be dealt with in the same way.”

— Marcel Proust

458. “And in the same way, again, are not the thoughts of men and women in the agony of death often turned towards the practical, painful, obscure, internal, intestinal aspect, towards that ‘seamy side’ of death which is, as it happens, the side that death actually presents to them and forces them to feel, a side which far more closely resembles a crushing burden, a difficulty in breathing, a destroying thirst, than the abstract idea to which we are accustomed to give the name of Death?”

— Marcel Proust

459. “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

460. “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

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

— Marcel Proust

462. “But in compensation for what our imagination leaves us wanting and we give ourselves so much unnecessary trouble in trying to find, life does give us something which we were very far from imagining.”

— Marcel Proust

463. “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

464. “No banishment, indeed, to the South Pole, or to the summit of Mont Blanc, can separate us so entirely from our fellow creatures as a prolonged residence in the seclusion of a secret vice, that is to say of a state of mind that is different from theirs.”

— Marcel Proust

465. “To determine not to think of it was but to think of it still, to suffer from it still.”

— Marcel Proust

466. “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

467. “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

468. “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

469. “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

470. “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

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

— Marcel Proust

472. “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

473. “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

474. “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

475. “She was capable of causing me pain, but no longer any joy. Pain alone kept my wearisome attachment alive.”

— Marcel Proust

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

— Marcel Proust

477. “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

478. “As with the future, it is not all at once but grain by grain that one savours the past.”

— Marcel Proust

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

— Marcel Proust

480. “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

481. “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

482. “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

483. “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

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

— Marcel Proust

485. “However, the fickle strivings of her heart and her mind did not encounter a will in her that, without limiting them, could guide them and keep her from becoming their charming and fragile plaything.”

— Marcel Proust

486. “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

487. “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

488. “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

489. “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

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

— Marcel Proust

491. “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

492. “We try to discover in things, which become precious to us on that account, the reflection of what our soul has projected on to them; we are disillusioned when we find that they are in reality devoid of the charm which they owed, in our minds, to the association of certain ideas; sometimes we mobilise all our spiritual forces in a glittering array in order to bring our influence to bear on other human beings who, we very well know, are situated outside ourselves where we can never reach them.”

— Marcel Proust

493. “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

494. “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

495. “But the true nature which we repress continues nevertheless to abide within us. Thus it is that at times, if we read the latest masterpiece of a man of genius, we are delighted to find in it all those of our own reflexions which we have despised, joys and sorrows which we have repressed, a whole world of feelings we have scorned, and whose value the book in which we discover them afresh suddenly teaches us.”

— Marcel Proust

496. “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

497. “It is often simply from lack of creative imagination that we do not go far enough in suffering.”

— Marcel Proust

498. “When our mistress is alive, a great part of the thoughts which form what we call our loves come to us during the hours when she is not by our side. Thus we acquire the habit of having as the object of our meditation an absent person, and one who, even if she remains absent for a few hours only, during those hours is no more than a memory. And so death does not make any great difference.”

— 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. “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