Top 500 Marcel Proust Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “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

152. “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

153. “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

154. “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

155. “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

156. “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

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

— Marcel Proust

158. “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

159. “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

160. “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

161. “As long as men are free to ask what they must, free to say what they think, free to think what they will, freedom can never be lost and science can never regress.”

— Marcel Proust

162. “We love only what we do not wholly possess.”

— Marcel Proust

163. “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

164. “Photography is the product of complete alienation.”

— Marcel Proust

165. “Beautiful books are always written in a sort of foreign language.”

— Marcel Proust

166. “We dream much of a paradise, or rather of a number of successive paradises, but each of them is, long before we die, a paradise lost, in which we should feel ourselves lost too.”

— Marcel Proust

167. “In reality, in love there is a permanent suffering which joy neutralizes, renders virtual delays, but which can at any moment become what it would have become long earlier if one had not obtained what one wanted – atrocious.”

— Marcel Proust

168. “Dear Friend: I have nearly died three times since morning.”

— Marcel Proust

169. “We are all of us obliged, if we are to make reality endurable, to nurse a few little follies in ourselves.”

— Marcel Proust

170. “Even in the most insignificant details of our daily life, none of us can be said to constitute a material whole, which is identical for everyone, and need only be turned up like a page in an account-book or the record of a will; our social personality is created by the thoughts of other people.”

— Marcel Proust

171. “Like a blood-red sky that warns the passerby, “There is a fire over there,” certain blazing looks often reveal passions that they serve merely to reflect. They are flames in the mirror.”

— Marcel Proust

172. “Thanks to art, instead of seeing one world, our own, we see it multiplied and as many original artists as there are, so many worlds are at our disposal.”

— Marcel Proust

173. “We are not provided with wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can take for us, an effort which no one can spare us.”

— Marcel Proust

174. “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.”

— Marcel Proust

175. “I have every useless thing in the world in my house there. The only thing wanting is the necessary thing, a great patch of open sky like this. Always try to keep a patch of sky above your life, little boy,” he added, turning to me. “You have a soul in you of rare quality, an artist’s nature; never let it starve for lack of what it needs.”

— Marcel Proust

176. “The sea thus enchants us like music, which, unlike language, never bears the traces of things, never tells us anything about human beings, but imitates the stirrings of the soul.”

— Marcel Proust

177. “No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me.”

— Marcel Proust

178. “That is why the better part of our memories exists outside us, in a blatter of rain, in the smell of an unaired room or of the first crackling brushwood fire in a cold grate: wherever, in short, we happen upon what our mind, having no use for it, had rejected, the last treasure that the past has in store, the richest, that which, when all our flow of tears seems to have dried at the source, can make us weep again.”

— Marcel Proust

179. “We are ordinarily so indifferent to people that when we have invested one of them with the possibility of giving us joy, or suffering, it seems as if he must belong to some other universe, he is imbued with poetry.”

— Marcel Proust

180. “We are at times too ready to believe that the present is the only possible state of things.”

— Marcel Proust

181. “In a separation it is the one who is not really in love who says the more tender things.”

— Marcel Proust

182. “Each reader reads only what is already within himself. The book is only a sort of optical instrument which the writer offers to the reader to enable the latter to discover in himself what he would not have found but for the aid of the book.”

— Marcel Proust

183. “All our final decisions are made in a state of mind that is not going to last.”

— Marcel Proust

184. “The great quality of true art is that it rediscovers, grasps and reveals to us that reality far from where we live, from which we get farther and farther away as the conventional knowledge we substitute for it becomes thicker and more impermeable.”

— Marcel Proust

185. “Your soul is a dark forest. But the trees are of a particular species, they are genealogical trees.”

— Marcel Proust

186. “Habit is, of all the plants of human growth, the one that has the least need of nutritious soil in order to live, and is the first to appear on the most seemingly barren rock.”

— Marcel Proust

187. “The best vaccine against anger is to watch others in its throes.”

— Marcel Proust

188. “In reality, every reader, while he is reading, is the reader of his own self. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument, which he offers to the reader to permit him to discern what, without the book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself. The reader’s recognition in his own self of what the book says is the proof of its truth.”

— Marcel Proust

189. “Like everybody who is not in love, he thought one chose the person to be loved after endless deliberations and on the basis of particular qualities or advantages.”

— Marcel Proust

190. “It is comforting when one has a sorrow to lie in the warmth of one’s bed and there, abandoning all effort and all resistance, to bury even one’s head under the cover, giving one’s self up to it completely, moaning like branches in the autumn wind. But there is still a better bed, full of divine odors. It is our sweet, our profound, our impenetrable friendship.”

— Marcel Proust

191. “It is said that nothing in our lives is ever lost, that nothing can prevent its having been. That is why, so very often the weight of the past lies ineluctably upon the present. But that is why it is so real in memory, so wholly itself, so far beyond replacement.”

— Marcel Proust

192. “In reality, every reader is, while reading, the reader of his own self.”

— Marcel Proust

193. “I have built, deep in my heart, a chapel filled with you.”

— Marcel Proust

194. “Death is in truth an illness from which we recover.”

— Marcel Proust

195. “There is no man, however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived in a way the consciousness of which is so unpleasant to him in later life that he would gladly, if he could, expunge it from his memory.”

— Marcel Proust

196. “That translucent alabaster of our memories.”

— Marcel Proust

197. “We construct our lives for one person, and when at length it is ready to receive her that person does not come; presently she is dead to us, and we live on, prisoners within the walls which were intended only for her.”

— Marcel Proust

198. “Neurosis has an absolute genius for malingering. There is no illness which it cannot counterfeit perfectly. If it is capable of deceiving the doctor, how should it fail to deceive the patient.”

— Marcel Proust

199. “Everybody calls “clear” those ideas which have the same degree of confusion as his own.”

— Marcel Proust

200. “The time which we have at our disposal every day is elastic; the passions that we feel expand it, those that we inspire contract it; and habit fills up what remains.”

— Marcel Proust