Top 500 Marcel Proust Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “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

452. “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

453. “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

454. “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

455. “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

456. “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

457. “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

458. “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

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

— Marcel Proust

460. “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

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

— Marcel Proust

462. “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

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

— Marcel Proust

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

— Marcel Proust

465. “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

466. “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

467. “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

468. “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

469. “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

470. “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

471. “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

472. “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

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

— Marcel Proust

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

— Marcel Proust

475. “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

476. “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

477. “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

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

— Marcel Proust

479. “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

480. “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

481. “I had indeed suffered successively through Gilberte, through Mme de Guermantes, through Albertine. Successively also I had forgotten them and only my love, dedicated at different times to different beings, had lasted.”

— Marcel Proust

482. “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

483. “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

484. “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

485. “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

486. “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

487. “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

488. “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

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

— Marcel Proust

490. “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

491. “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

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

— Marcel Proust

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

— Marcel Proust

494. “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

495. “To tell the truth, I attached no importance to this possibility of hearing Berma which, a few years earlier, had plunged me in such a state of agitation. And it was not without a sense of melancholy that I realized the fact of my indifference to what at one time I had put before health, comfort, everything.”

— Marcel Proust

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

— Marcel Proust

497. “Let a prize lower my position, if it causes me to be read; that I prefer immediately to all the honors.”

— Marcel Proust

498. “For we form so extravagant an idea of certain characters that we would be incapable of identifying one of them with the familiar features of a person of our acquaintance.”

— Marcel Proust

499. “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

500. “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