Top 500 Marcel Proust Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “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

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

— Marcel Proust

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

— Marcel Proust

204. “When we are kept waiting, we suffer so keenly from the absence of the person for whom we are longing that we cannot endure the presence of anyone else.”

— Marcel Proust

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

— Marcel Proust

206. “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

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

— Marcel Proust

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

— Marcel Proust

209. “To a great extent, suffering is a sort of need felt by the organism to make itself familiar with a new state, which makes it uneasy, to adapt its sensibility to that state.”

— Marcel Proust

210. “Sometimes, too, just as Eve was created from a rib of Adam, so a woman would come into existence while I was sleeping, conceived from some strain in the position of my limbs. Formed by the appetite that I was on the point of gratifying, she it was, I imagined, who offered me that gratification. My body, conscious that its own warmth was permeating hers, would strive to become one with her, and I would awake.”

— Marcel Proust

211. “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

212. “One must never miss an opportunity of quoting things by others which are always more interesting than those one thinks up oneself.”

— Marcel Proust

213. “Only through art can we emerge from ourselves and know what another person sees.”

— Marcel Proust

214. “People don’t know when they are happy. They’re never so unhappy as they think they are.”

— Marcel Proust

215. “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

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

— Marcel Proust

217. “We fall in love for a smile, a look, a shoulder. That is enough; then, in the long hours of hope or sorrow, we fabricate a person, we compose a character.”

— Marcel Proust

218. “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

219. “The loss of a sense adds as much beauty to the world as its acquisition.”

— Marcel Proust

220. “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

221. “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

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

— Marcel Proust

223. “When we are in love, our love is too vast to be wholly contained within ourselves; it radiates outwards, reaches the resistant surface of the loved one, which reflects it back to its starting-point; and this return of our own tenderness is what we see as the other’s feelings, working their new, enhanced charm on us, because we do not recognize them as having originated in ourselves.”

— Marcel Proust

224. “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

225. “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

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

— Marcel Proust

227. “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

228. “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

229. “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

230. “There is hardly a single action we perform in that phase which we would not give anything, in later life, to be able to annul. Whereas what we ought to regret is that we no longer possess the spontaneity which made us perform them. In later life we look at things in a more practical way, in full conformity with the rest of society, but adolescence is the only period in which we learn anything.”

— Marcel Proust

231. “We enjoy lovely music, beautiful paintings, a thousand intellectual delicacies, but we have no idea of their cost, to those who invented them, in sleepless nights, tears, spasmodic laughter, rashes, asthmas, epilepsies, and the fear of death, which is worse than all the rest.”

— Marcel Proust

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

— Marcel Proust

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

— Marcel Proust

234. “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

235. “The beauty of images lies behind things, the beauty of ideas in front of them.”

— Marcel Proust

236. “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

237. “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

238. “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

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

— Marcel Proust

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

— Marcel Proust

241. “As soon as jealousy is discovered, it is regarded by the person who is its object as a challenge which justifies deception.”

— Marcel Proust

242. “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

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

— Marcel Proust

244. “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

245. “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

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

— Marcel Proust

248. “I was not one man only but the steady advance hour after hour of an army in close formation, in which there appeared, according to the moment, impassioned men, indifferent men, jealous men.”

— Marcel Proust

249. “A book is like a large cemetery upon whose tombs one can no longer read the effaced names. On the other hand, sometimes one remembers well the name, without knowing if anything of the being, whose name it was, survives in these pages.”

— Marcel Proust

250. “It’s a funny thing, now; I very often think of my poor wife, but I cannot think of her very much at any one time.” “Often, but a little at a time, like poor old Swann,” became one of my grandfather’s favourite phrases, which he would apply to all kinds of things.”

— Marcel Proust