Top 500 Marcel Proust Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “We love only what we do not wholly possess.”

— Marcel Proust

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

— Marcel Proust

153. “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

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

— Marcel Proust

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

— Marcel Proust

156. “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

157. “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

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

— Marcel Proust

159. “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

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

— Marcel Proust

161. “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

162. “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

163. “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

164. “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

165. “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

166. “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

167. “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

168. “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

169. “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

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

— Marcel Proust

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

— Marcel Proust

172. “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

173. “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

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

— Marcel Proust

175. “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

176. “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

177. “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

178. “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

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

— Marcel Proust

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

— Marcel Proust

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

— Marcel Proust

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

— Marcel Proust

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

— Marcel Proust

184. “That translucent alabaster of our memories.”

— Marcel Proust

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

— Marcel Proust

186. “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

187. “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

188. “We pack the physical outline of the creature we see with all the ideas we have already formed about him, and in the complete picture of him we compose in our minds those ideas have certainly the principal place.”

— Marcel Proust

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

— Marcel Proust

190. “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

191. “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

192. “Only by art can we get outside ourselves, instead of seeing only one world, our own, we see it under multiple forms.”

— Marcel Proust

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

— Marcel Proust

194. “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

195. “Le bonheur est dans l’amour un e tat anormal. In love, happiness is abnormal.”

— Marcel Proust

196. “A picture’s beauty does not depend on the things portrayed in it.”

— Marcel Proust

197. “The anaesthetic effect of custom being destroyed, I would begin to think and to feel very melancholy things. The door-handle of my room, which was different to me from all the other doorhandles in the world, inasmuch as it seemed to open of its own accord and without my having to turn it, so unconscious had its manipulation become; lo and behold, it was now an astral body for Golo. And.”

— Marcel Proust

198. “The world was not created once and for all time for each of us individually. There are added to it in the course of our life things of which we have never had any suspicion.”

— Marcel Proust

199. “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

200. “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