Top 500 Marcel Proust Quotes (2023 Update)
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201. “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

202. “Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and composed our masterpieces.”

— Marcel Proust

203. “Even his mother, his own mother, had once accused him of being a snob.”

— Marcel Proust

204. “Le style, pour l’e crivain aussi bien que pour le peintre, est une question non de technique mais de vision. For the writer as well as for the painter, style is not a question of technique, but of vision.”

— Marcel Proust

205. “Wir werden von einem Leiden nur geheilt, indem wir es bis zum Letzten auskosten.”

— Marcel Proust

206. “My body, still too heavy with sleep to move...”

— Marcel Proust

207. “Nine tenths of the ills from which intelligent people suffer spring from their intellect.”

— Marcel Proust

208. “The opinions which we hold of one another, our relations with friends and kinsfolk are in no sense permanent, save in appearance, but are as eternally fluid as the sea itself.”

— Marcel Proust

209. “Each artist seems thus to be the native of an unknown country, which he himself has forgotten, different from that from which will emerge, making for the earth, another great artist.”

— Marcel Proust

210. “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

211. “There is in this world in which everything wears out, everything perishes, one thing that crumbles into dust, that destroys itself still more completely, leaving behind still fewer traces of itself than Beauty: namely Grief.”

— Marcel Proust

212. “The real stars of society are tired of appearing there. He who is curious to gaze at them must often migrate to another hemisphere, where they are more or less alone.”

— Marcel Proust

213. “As to the pretty girls who went past, from the day on which I had first known that their cheeks could be kissed, I had become curious about their souls. And the Universe had appeared to me more interesting.”

— Marcel Proust

214. “Our desires cut across one another, and in this confused existence it is rare for happiness to coincide with the desire that clamoured for it.”

— Marcel Proust

215. “We live not alone but chained to a creature of a different kingdom: our body.”

— Marcel Proust

216. “But sometimes the future is latent in us without our knowing it, and our supposedly lying words foreshadow an imminent reality.”

— Marcel Proust

217. “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

218. “The universe is true for us all and dissimilar to each of us.”

— Marcel Proust

219. “Happiness is salutary for the body but sorrow develops the powers of the spirit.”

— Marcel Proust

220. “It is desire that engenders belief; if we fail as a rule to take this into account, it is because most of the desires that create beliefs end only with out own life.”

— Marcel Proust

221. “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

222. “The most powerful soporific is sleep itself.”

— Marcel Proust

223. “Proust was the greatest novelist of the twentieth century, just as Tolstoy was in the nineteenth.”

— Marcel Proust

224. “Then his jealousy rejoiced at the discovery, as though that jealousy had had an independent existence, fiercely egotistical, gluttonous of every thing that would feed its vitality, even at the expense of Swann himself.”

— Marcel Proust

225. “What a profound significance small things assume when the woman we love conceals them from us.”

— Marcel Proust

226. “Sometimes in this life, under the stress of an exceptional emotion, people do say what they think.”

— Marcel Proust

227. “No exile at the South Pole or on the summit of Mont Blanc separates us more effectively from others than the practice of a hidden vice.”

— Marcel Proust

228. “But to ask pity of our body is like discoursing in front of an octopus, for which our words can have no more meaning than the sound of the tides, and with which we should be appalled to find ourselves condemned to live.”

— Marcel Proust

229. “In later life we look at things in a more practical way, in full conformity with the rest of society, but youth was the only time in which we learned anything.”

— Marcel Proust

230. “The only possible paradises are those we have lost.”

— Marcel Proust

231. “In the human race, the frequency of the virtues that are identical in us all is not more wonderful than the multiplicity of the defects that are peculiar to each one of us. Undoubtedly, it is not common sense that is “the commonest thing in the world”; it is human kindness.”

— Marcel Proust

232. “We become moral when we are unhappy.”

— Marcel Proust

233. “The character we exhibit in the latter half of our life need not necessarily be, though it often is, our original character, developed further, dried up, exaggerated, or diminished. It can be its exact opposite, like a suit worn inside out.”

— Marcel Proust

234. “As soon as he ceased to be mad he became merely stupid. There are maladies we must not seek to cure because they alone protect us from others that are more serious.”

— Marcel Proust

235. “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

236. “The bonds between ourselves and another person exists only in our minds. Memory as it grows fainter loosens them, and notwithstanding the illusion by which we want to be duped and which, out of love, friendship, politeness, deference, duty, we dupe other people, we exist alone. Man is the creature who cannot escape from himself, who knows other people only in himself, and when he asserts the contrary, he is lying.”

— Marcel Proust

237. “Dinner-parties bore us because our imagination is absent, and reading interests us because it is keeping us company.”

— Marcel Proust

238. “As a rule it is with our being reduced to a minimum that we live; most of our faculties lie dormant because they can rely upon Habit, which knows what there is to be done and has no need of their services. But on this morning of travel, the interruption of the routine of my existence, the unfamiliar place and time, had made their presence indispensable.”

— Marcel Proust

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

— Marcel Proust

240. “Masterpieces are no more than the shipwrecked flotsam of great minds.”

— Marcel Proust

241. “For we are not as faithful to the being we have most loved as we are to ourselves and sooner or later we forget her – since that is one of our characteristics – so as to start loving another.”

— Marcel Proust

242. “Pleasure in this respect is like photography. What we take, in the presence of the beloved object, is merely a negative film; we develop it later, when we are at home, and have once again found at our disposal that inner darkroom, the entrance to which is barred to us so long as we are with other people.”

— Marcel Proust

243. “When a man is asleep, he has in a circle round him the chain of the hours, the sequence of the years, the order of the heavenly host.”

— Marcel Proust

244. “Three-quarters of the sicknesses of intelligent people come from their intelligence. They need at least a doctor who can understand this sickness.”

— Marcel Proust

245. “A sort of egotistical self-evaluation is unavoidable in those joys in which erudition and art mingle and in which aesthetic pleasure may become more acute, but not remain as pure.”

— Marcel Proust

246. “Nous sommes tous oblige s, pour rendre la re alite supportable, d’entretenir en nous quelques petites folies. We must all indulge in a few follies if we are to make reality bearable.”

— Marcel Proust

247. “Women who are to some extent resistant, whom one cannot possess at once, whom one does not even know at first whether one will ever possess, are the only interesting ones.”

— Marcel Proust

248. “The artist who gives up an hour of work for an hour of conversation with a friend knows that he is sacrificing a reality for something that does not exist.”

— Marcel Proust

249. “We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world. The lives that you admire, the attitudes that seem noble to you, have not been shaped by a paterfamilias or a schoolmaster, they have sprung from very different beginnings, having been influenced by evil or commonplace that prevailed round them. They represent a struggle and a victory.”

— Marcel Proust

250. “Thus I had already reached the conclusion that we are in no wise free in the presence of a work of art, that we do not create it as we please but that it pre-exists in us and we are compelled as though it were a law of nature to discover it because it is at once hidden from us and necessary.”

— Marcel Proust