Top 500 Marcel Proust Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 2 of 10

51. “If there is one thing more difficult than submitting oneself to a regime it is refraining from imposing it on other people.”

— Marcel Proust

52. “The time at our disposal each day is elastic; the passions we feel dilate it, those that inspire us shrink it, and habit fills it.”

— Marcel Proust

53. “The highest praise of God consists in the denial of him by the atheist who finds creation so perfect that it can dispense with a creator.”

— Marcel Proust

54. “But sometimes illumination comes to our rescue at the very moment when all seems lost; we have knocked at every door and they open on nothing until, at last, we stumble unconsciously against the only one through which we can enter the kingdom we have sought in vain a hundred years – and it opens.”

— Marcel Proust

55. “After a certain age, the more one becomes oneself, the more obvious one’s family traits become.”

— Marcel Proust

56. “People do not die for us immediately, but remain bathed in a sort of aura of life which bears no relation to true immortality but through which they continue to occupy our thoughts in the same way as when they were alive. It is as though they were traveling abroad.”

— Marcel Proust

57. “A little insomnia is not without its value in making us appreciate sleep, in throwing a ray of light upon that darkness.”

— Marcel Proust

58. “The particulars of life do not matter to the artist; they merely provide him with the opportunity to lay bare his genius.”

— Marcel Proust

59. “We ought at least, from prudence, never to speak of ourselves, because that is a subject on which we may be sure that other people’s views are never in accordance with our own.”

— Marcel Proust

60. “It is our imagination that is responsible for love, not the other person.”

— Marcel Proust

61. “The stellar universe is not so difficult to understand as the real actions of other people, especially of the people with whom we are in love.”

— Marcel Proust

62. “Our memory is like a shop in the window of which is exposed now one, now another photograph of the same person. And as a rule the most recent exhibit remains for some time the only one to be seen.”

— Marcel Proust

63. “When from a long distant past nothing subsists after the things are broken and scattered, the smell and taste of things remain.”

— Marcel Proust

64. “To the pure all things are pure!”

— Marcel Proust

65. “Desire makes everything blossom; possession makes everything wither and fade.”

— Marcel Proust

66. “For each illness that doctors cure with medicine, they provoke ten in healthy people by inoculating them with the virus that is a thousand times more powerful than any microbe: the idea that one is ill.”

— Marcel Proust

67. “People wish to learn to swim and at the same time to keep one foot on the ground.”

— Marcel Proust

68. “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

69. “All the mind’s activity is easy if it is not subjected to reality.”

— Marcel Proust

70. “May you always see a blue sky overhead, my young friend; and then, even when the time comes, as it has come for me now, when the woods are black, when night is fast falling, you will be able to console yourself, as I do, by looking up at the sky.”

— Marcel Proust

71. “There is not a woman in the world the possession of whom is as precious as that of the truths which she reveals to us by causing us to suffer.”

— Marcel Proust

72. “Time passes, and little by little everything that we have spoken in falsehood becomes true.”

— Marcel Proust

73. “For every sin there is forgiveness, and especially for the sins of youth.”

— Marcel Proust

74. “People who are not in love fail to understand how an intelligent man can suffer because of a very ordinary woman. This is like being surprised that anyone should be stricken with cholera because of a creature so insignificant as the common bacillus.”

— Marcel Proust

75. “One cannot change, that is to say become a different person, while continuing to acquiesce to the feelings of the person one has ceased to be.”

— Marcel Proust

76. “There is no idea that does not carry in itself a possible refutation, no word that does not imply its opposite.”

— Marcel Proust

77. “The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it...”

— Marcel Proust

78. “Perfume is that last and best reserve of the past, the one which when all out tears have run dry, can make us cry again!”

— Marcel Proust

79. “Indeed, among the lesser auxiliaries to success in love, an absence, the declining of an invitation to dinner, an unintentional, unconscious harshness are of more service than all the cosmetics and fine clothes in the world.”

— Marcel Proust

80. “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

81. “If we are to make reality endurable, we must all nourish a fantasy or two.”

— Marcel Proust

82. “An hour is not merely an hour, it is a vase full of scents and sounds and projects and climates.”

— Marcel Proust

83. “There can be no peace of mind in love, since the advantage one has secured is never anything but a fresh starting-point for future desires.”

— Marcel Proust

84. “The inertia of the mind urges it to slide down the easy slope of imagination, rather than to climb the steep slope of introspection.”

— Marcel Proust

85. “I have a horror of sunsets; they’re so romantic, so operatic.”

— Marcel Proust

86. “Instead of seeking new landscapes, develop new eyes.”

— Marcel Proust

87. “The bonds that unite another person to our self exist only in our mind.”

— Marcel Proust

88. “If only for the sake of elegance, I try to remain morally pure.”

— Marcel Proust

89. “Things don’t change, but by and by our wishes change.”

— Marcel Proust

90. “Love is an incurable malady like those pathetic states in which rheumatism affords the sufferer a brief respite only to be replaced by epileptiform headaches.”

— Marcel Proust

91. “Let us leave pretty women to men devoid of imagination.”

— Marcel Proust

92. “How paradoxical it is to search reality for the pictures that are stored in one’s memory.”

— Marcel Proust

93. “I should have been happy: I wasn’t.”

— Marcel Proust

94. “To have a kind heart is everything.”

— Marcel Proust

95. “Illness is the doctor to whom we pay most heed; to kindness, to knowledge, we make promise only; pain we obey.”

— Marcel Proust

96. “There are optical illusions in time as well as space.”

— Marcel Proust

97. “I had come in time to learn that it was a mistake to smile a friendly smile when somebody made a fool of me.”

— Marcel Proust

98. “Just as those who practice the same profession recognize each other instinctively, so do those who practice the same vice.”

— Marcel Proust

99. “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

100. “Unkindness is inspired by hatred, anger fuels it into action in which there is no great joy; it would take sadism to turn it into something pleasurable; unkind people imagine themselves to be inflicting pain on someone equally unkind.”

— Marcel Proust