Top 500 Marcel Proust Quotes (2024 Update)
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102. “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

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

— Marcel Proust

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

— Marcel Proust

105. “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

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

— Marcel Proust

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

— Marcel Proust

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

— Marcel Proust

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

— Marcel Proust

110. “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

111. “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

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

— Marcel Proust

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

— Marcel Proust

114. “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

115. “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

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

— Marcel Proust

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

— Marcel Proust

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

— Marcel Proust

119. “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

120. “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

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

— Marcel Proust

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

— Marcel Proust

123. “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

124. “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

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

— Marcel Proust

126. “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

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

— Marcel Proust

128. “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

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

— Marcel Proust

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

— Marcel Proust

131. “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

132. “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

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

— Marcel Proust

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

— Marcel Proust

135. “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

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

— Marcel Proust

137. “Desire makes everything blossom.”

— Marcel Proust

138. “The sensitiveness claimed by neurotic is matched by their egotism: they cannot abide the flaunting by others of the sufferings to which they pay an even increasing amount of attention in themselves.”

— Marcel Proust

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

— Marcel Proust

140. “Anything we have not had to decipher, to bring to light by our own effort, anything which was already clearly visible, is not our own.”

— Marcel Proust

141. “All the great writers are like that: the beauty of their sentences, like the beauty of a woman one has not yet met, is unforeseeable...”

— Marcel Proust

142. “A ‘real’ person, profoundly as we may sympathise with him, is in a great measure perceptible only through our senses, that is to say, he remains opaque, offers a dead weight which our sensibilities have not the strength to lift.”

— Marcel Proust

143. “No doubt very few people understand the purely subjective nature of the phenomenon that we call love, or how it creates, so to speak, a supplementary person, distinct from the person whom the world knows by the same name, a person most of whose constituent elements are derived from ourselves.”

— Marcel Proust

144. “Depth of character, or a melancholy expression on a woman’s face would freeze his senses, which would, however, immediately melt at the sight of healthy, abundant, rosy human flesh.”

— Marcel Proust

145. “There is, following an ample meal, a sort of pause in time, filled with a gentle slackening of thought and energy, when to sit doing nothing gives us a sense of life’s richness and a feeling that the least effort would be intolerable. The melancholy we took with us to table has disappeared and, if we think of it at all it is only to smile, as at some black mood now past, its cause having gone. And with the melancholy, all scruple, all remorse departs from us.”

— Marcel Proust

146. “How else learn the real, if not by inventing what might lie outside it?”

— Marcel Proust

147. “The paradoxes of today are the prejudices of tomorrow, since the most benighted and the most deplorable prejudices have had their moment of novelty when fashion lent them its fragile grace.”

— Marcel Proust

148. “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

149. “We believe we can change things according to our wishes because that’s the only happy solution we can see. We don’t think of what usually happens and what is also a happy solution; things don’t change, but by and by our wishes change.”

— Marcel Proust

150. “Like a kaleidoscope which is every now and then given a turn, society arranges successively in different orders elements which one would have supposed immutable, and composes a new pattern.”

— Marcel Proust