Top 500 Marcel Proust Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “We shall see later on that the diversity of the forms of death that circulate invisibly is the cause of the peculiar unexpectedness of obituary notices in the newspapers.”

— Marcel Proust

102. “I feel infinite sadness at seeing how few people are genuinely kind.”

— Marcel Proust

103. “We have such numerous interests in our lives that it is not uncommon, on a single occasion, for the foundations of a happiness that does not yet exist to be laid down alongside the intensification of a grief from which we are still suffering.”

— Marcel Proust

104. “When I went to Venice I found that my dream had become-incredibly, but quite simply-my address.”

— Marcel Proust

105. “Time, which changes people, does not alter the image we have retained of them.”

— Marcel Proust

106. “When two people part it is the one who is not in love who makes the tender speeches.”

— Marcel Proust

107. “The stellar universe is not so difficult of comprehension as the real actions of other people.”

— Marcel Proust

108. “Love is space and time made perceptible to the heart.”

— Marcel Proust

109. “Ambition is more intoxicating than fame; desire makes all things blossom, possession wilts them; it is better to dream your life than to live it, even if living it means dreaming it, though both less mysteriously and less vividly, in a murky and sluggish dream, like the straggling dream in the feeble awareness of ruminant creatures.”

— Marcel Proust

110. “Les vrais paradis sont les paradis qu’on a perdus.”

— Marcel Proust

111. “Conversation, which is friendship’s mode of expression, is a superficial digression which gives us nothing worth acquiring. We may talk for a lifetime without doing more than indefinitely repeat the vacuity of a minute.”

— Marcel Proust

112. “Truth is a point of view about things.”

— Marcel Proust

113. “Love is not vain because it is frustrated, but because it is fulfilled. The people we love turn to ashes when we posess them.”

— Marcel Proust

114. “A cathedral, a wave of a storm, a dancer’s leap, never turn out to be as high as we had hoped.”

— Marcel Proust

115. “A powerful idea communicates some of its strength to him who challenges it.”

— Marcel Proust

116. “My mother had to abandon her quest, but managed to extract from the restriction itself a further delicate thought, like good poets whom the tyranny of rhyme forces into the discovery of their finest lines.”

— Marcel Proust

117. “I felt myself still reliving a past which was no longer anything more than the history of another person;.”

— Marcel Proust

118. “Less disappointing than life, great works of art do not begin by giving us all their best.”

— Marcel Proust

119. “La possession de ce qu’on aime est une joie plus grande encore que l’amour. Possessing what one loves is an even greater joy than love itself.”

— Marcel Proust

120. “In love, happiness is an abnormal state.”

— Marcel Proust

121. “It is a mistake to speak of a bad choice in love, since, as soon as a choice exists, it can only be bad.”

— Marcel Proust

122. “Nature hardly seems capable of giving us any but quite short illnesses. But medicine has annexed to itself the art of prolonging them.”

— Marcel Proust

123. “Happiness serves hardly any other purpose than to make unhappiness possible.”

— Marcel Proust

124. “To think that I have wasted years of my life, that I have longed for death, that the greatest love that I have ever known has been for a woman who did not please me, who was not in my style!” PLACE-NAMES:.”

— Marcel Proust

125. “The truth is that every morning war is declared afresh. And the men who wish to continue it are as guilty as the men who began it, more guilty perhaps, for the latter perhaps did not foresee all its horrors.”

— Marcel Proust

126. “Existence is of little interest save on days when the dust of realities is mingled with magic sand.”

— Marcel Proust

127. “The features of our face are hardly more than gestures which force of habit made permanent. Nature, like the destruction of Pompeii, like the metamorphosis of a nymph into a tree, has arrested us in an accustomed movement.”

— Marcel Proust

128. “En cuanto somos desdichados, nos volvemos morales.”

— Marcel Proust

129. “It is often hard to bear the tears that we ourselves have caused.”

— Marcel Proust

130. “There is a beauty in being surrounded by the foreign – seeing things from a new perspective, with new eyes.”

— Marcel Proust

131. “Our worst fears, like our greatest hopes, are not outside our powers, and we can come in the end to triumph over the former and to achieve the latter.”

— Marcel Proust

132. “A work should convey its entire meaning by itself, imposing it on the spectator even before he knows what the subject is.”

— Marcel Proust

133. “We were resigned to suffering, thinking that we loved outside ourselves, and we perceive that our love is a function of our sorrow, that our love perhaps is our sorrow...”

— Marcel Proust

134. “L’amour, c’est l’espace et le temps rendus sensibles au coeur.”

— Marcel Proust

135. “Quartering the topmost branches of one of the tall trees, an invisible bird was striving to make the day seem shorter, exploring with a long-drawn note the solitude that pressed it on every side, but it received at once so unanimous an answer, so powerful a repercussion of silence and of immobility, that one felt it had arrested for all eternity the moment which it had been trying to make pass more quickly.”

— Marcel Proust

136. “The duty and the task of a writer are those of an interpreter.”

— Marcel Proust

137. “We can only be faithful to what we remember, and we remember only what we have known.”

— Marcel Proust

138. “A doctor who doesn’t say too many foolish things is a patient half-cured.”

— Marcel Proust

139. “The only true voyage of discovery, the only fountain of Eternal Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another.”

— Marcel Proust

140. “For a man cannot change, that is to say become another person, while he continues to obey the dictates of the self which he has ceased to be.”

— Marcel Proust

141. “But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.”

— Marcel Proust

142. “Our shadows, now parallel, now close together and joined, traced an exquisite pattern at our feet.”

— Marcel Proust

143. “I spent many a charming evening talking and playing with Albertine, but none so sweet as when I was watching her sleep.”

— Marcel Proust

144. “He imagined himself lying there, unable to sleep, thinking of his mother, separated from her by the unresponsive blankets tucked too tightly round him, feeling the ceaseless thumping of his heart in the silence of the night, the irrevocability of absence, the rigid stillness of repose, the agony of solitude and sleeplessness. If the room was a prison, the bed was a tomb.”

— Marcel Proust

145. “Only imagination and belief can differentiate from the rest certain objects, certain people, and can create an atmosphere.”

— Marcel Proust

146. “The social leaders who refuse to allow politics into society are as foreseeing as the soldiers who refuse to allow politics to permeate the army. Society is like the sexual appetite; one does not know at what forms of perversion it may not arrive, once we have allowed our choice to be dictated by aesthetic considerations.”

— Marcel Proust

147. “Error, by force of contrast, enhances the triumph of Truth.”

— Marcel Proust

148. “Perhaps she would not have thought of wickedness as a state so rare, so abnormal, so exotic, one which it was so refreshing to visit, had she been able to distinguish in herself, as in all her fellow-men and women, that indifference to the sufferings which they cause which, whatever names else be given it, is the one true, terrible and lasting form of cruelty.”

— Marcel Proust

149. “There’s nothing like desire to prevent the things one says from having any resemblance to the things in one’s mind.”

— Marcel Proust

150. “Desire makes everything blossom.”

— Marcel Proust