Top 500 Marcel Proust Quotes (2023 Update)
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251. “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

252. “She lived her life, but I may have been the only one to dream it.”

— Marcel Proust

253. “Prosperity of wicked men runs like a torrent past, and soon is spent.”

— Marcel Proust

254. “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

255. “A man of letters, merely by reading a phrase, can estimate exactly the literary merit of its author.”

— Marcel Proust

256. “Why, when we regain consciousness, is it not an identity other than the one we had previously that is embodied in us? It is not clear what dictates the choice nor why, among the millions of human beings we might be, it is the being we were the day before that we unerringly grasp.”

— Marcel Proust

257. “I wished to see storms only on those coasts where they raged with most violence...”

— Marcel Proust

258. “It is the tragedy of other people that they are to us merely showcases for the very perishable collections of our own mind.”

— Marcel Proust

259. “A ‘sadist’ of her kind is an artist in evil, which a wholly wicked person could not be...”

— Marcel Proust

260. “A fashionable milieu is one in which everybody’s opinion is made up of the opinion of all the others. Has everybody a different opinion? Then it is a literary milieu.”

— Marcel Proust

261. “People claim that we recapture for a moment the self that we were long ago when we enter some house or garden in which we used to live in our youth. But these are most hazardous pilgrimages, which end as often in disappointment as in success. It is in ourselves that we should rather seek to find those fixed places, contemporaneous with different years.”

— Marcel Proust

262. “Man is the creature that cannot emerge from himself, that knows his fellows only in himself; when he asserts the contrary, he is lying.”

— Marcel Proust

263. “There are mountainous, arduous days, up which one takes an infinite time to climb, and downward-sloping days which one can descend at full tilt, singing as one goes.”

— Marcel Proust

264. “Il faudrait choisir de cesser de souffrir ou de cesser d’aimer.”

— Marcel Proust

265. “What barrier is so insurmountable as silence?”

— Marcel Proust

266. “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

267. “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

268. “She’s got feet like boats, whiskers like an American, and her undies are filthy.”

— Marcel Proust

269. “For, just as in the beginning it is formed by desire, so afterwards love is kept in existence only by painful anxiety.”

— Marcel Proust

270. “The breath of the enchanted wind mingles the fresh scent of the lilacs with the fragrance of the past.”

— Marcel Proust

271. “The idea of popular art, like that of a patriotic art, if not actually dangerous seemed to me ridiculous. If the intention was to make art accessible to the people by sacrificing refinements of form, on the ground that they are “all right for the idle rich” but not for anybody else, I had seen enough of fashionable society to know that it is there that one finds real illiteracy and not, let us say, among electricians.”

— Marcel Proust

272. “His jealousy, like an octopus which throws out a first, then a second, and finally a third tentacle, fastened itself irremovably first to that moment, five o’clock in the afternoon, then to another, then to another again. But Swann was incapable of inventing his sufferings. They were only the memory, the perpetuation of a suffering that had come to him from without.”

— Marcel Proust

273. “There is an inanimate object which has a capacity to exasperate which no human being will ever attain: a piano.”

— Marcel Proust

274. “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

275. “In the end they come to fill out so completely the curve of his cheeks, to follow so exactly the line of his nose, they blend so harmoniously in the sound of his voice that these seem to be no more than a transparent envelope, so that each time we see the face or hear the voice it is our own ideas of him which we recognise and to which we listen. And.”

— Marcel Proust

276. “Which drew from Bloch nothing more instructive than “Sir, I am absolutely incapable of telling you whether it has rained. I live so resolutely apart from physical contingencies that my senses no longer trouble to inform me of them.” “My.”

— Marcel Proust

277. “For instinct dictates our duty and the intellect supplies us with pretexts for evading it.”

— Marcel Proust

278. “The whole art of living is to use the people who make us suffer simply as steps enabling us to obtain access to their divine form and thus joyfully to people our lives with divinities.”

— Marcel Proust

279. “Our intonations contain our philosophy of life, what each of us is constantly telling himself about things.”

— Marcel Proust

280. “Those whose suffering is due to love are, as we say of certain invalids, their own physicians.”

— Marcel Proust

281. “And my grandmother had bought them in preference to other books, just as she would have preferred to take a house that had a gothic dovecot, or some other such piece of antiquity as would have a pleasant effect on the mind, filling it with a nostalgic longing for impossible journeys through the realms of time.”

— Marcel Proust

282. “L’ide e qu’on mourra est plus cruelle que mourir, mais moins que l’ide e qu’un autre est mort. The idea of dying is worse than dying itself, but less cruel than the idea that another has died.”

— Marcel Proust

283. “Reality is never more than a first step towards an unknown on the road to which one can never progress very far.”

— Marcel Proust

284. “A woman one loves rarely suffices for all our needs, so we deceive her with another whom we do not love.”

— Marcel Proust

285. “The charms of a passing woman are usually in direct relation to the speed of her passing.”

— Marcel Proust

286. “A photograph acquires something of the dignity which it ordinarily lacks when it ceases to be a reproduction of reality and shows us things that no longer exist.”

— Marcel Proust

287. “And so when studying faces, we do indeed measure them, but as painters, not as surveyors.”

— Marcel Proust

288. “This was because, in the most genuine exhaustion, there is, especially in neurotic people, an element that depends upon attracting their attention and is kept going only by an act of memory. We at once feel tired as soon as we are afraid of feeling tired, and, to throw off our fatigue, it suffices us to forget about it.”

— Marcel Proust

289. “Les plats se lisent et les livres se mangent.”

— Marcel Proust

290. “I drank a second mouthful in which I find nothing more than in the first, then a third which gives me rather less than the second. It is time to stop; the potion is losing its magic.”

— Marcel Proust

291. “To know a thing does not enable us, always, to prevent its happening, but after all the things that we know we do hold, if not in our hands, at any rate in our minds, where we can dispose of them as we choose, which gives us the illusion of a sort of power to control them.”

— Marcel Proust

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

— Marcel Proust

293. “Adultery breathes new life into marriages which have been left for dead.”

— Marcel Proust

294. “Unfortunately the next day was not the vast, extraneous expanse of time which I had feverishly looked forward. When it drew to a close my laziness and my painful struggle to overcome internal obstacles had simply lasted twenty-four hours longer.”

— Marcel Proust

295. “But the presence of Odette continued to sow in Swann’s heart alternate seeds of love and suspicion.”

— Marcel Proust

296. “We strive all the time to give our life its form, but we do so by copying willy-nilly, like a drawing, the features of the person that we are and not of the person we should like to be.”

— Marcel Proust

297. “But sometimes it is just when everything seems to be lost that we experience a presentiment that may save us; one has knocked on all the doors which lead nowhere, and then, unwittingly, one pushes against the only one through which one may enter and for which one would have searched in vain for a hundred years, and it opens.”

— Marcel Proust

298. “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

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

— Marcel Proust

300. “An artist has no need to express his mind directly in his work for it to express the quality of that mind; it has indeed been said that the highest praise of God consists in the denial of Him by the atheist, who finds creation so perfect that it can dispense with a creator.”

— Marcel Proust