Top 500 Marcel Proust Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “We live not alone but chained to a creature of a different kingdom: our body.”

— Marcel Proust

252. “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

253. “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

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

— Marcel Proust

255. “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

256. “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

257. “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

258. “I fatti non penetrano nel mondo in cui vivono le nostre convinzioni, non le hanno create e non possono distruggerle. Possono infliggere loro continue smentite senza appannarle.”

— Marcel Proust

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

— Marcel Proust

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

— Marcel Proust

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

— Marcel Proust

262. “Life is like that little sweetheart. We dream it and we love it in dreaming it. We should not try to live it: otherwise, like that little boy, we will plunge into stupidity, though not at one swoop, for in life everything degenerates by imperceptible nuances. At the end of ten years we no longer recognize our dreams; we deny them, we live, like a cow, for the grass we are grazing on at the moment. And who knows if our wedding with death might not lead to our conscious immortality?”

— Marcel Proust

263. “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

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

— Marcel Proust

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

— Marcel Proust

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

— Marcel Proust

267. “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

268. “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

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

— Marcel Proust

270. “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

271. “For every death is a simplification of existence for the others, removes the necessity to show gratitude, the obligation to pay visits.”

— Marcel Proust

272. “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

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

— Marcel Proust

274. “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

275. “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

276. “All the objects which he contemplated with as much curiosity and admiration as gratitude, for if, in absorbing his dreams, they had delivered him from an obsession, they themselves were, in turn, enriched by the absorption; they shewed him the palpable realisation of his fancies, and they interested his mind; they took shape and grew solid before his eyes, and at the same time they soothed his troubled heart.”

— Marcel Proust

277. “In most women’s lives, everything, even the greatest sorrow, comes down to a question of ‘I haven’t got a thing to wear’.”

— Marcel Proust

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

— Marcel Proust

279. “Other people are, as a rule, so immaterial to us that, when we have entrusted to any one of them the power to cause so much suffering or happiness to ourselves, that person seems at once to belong to a different universe, is surrounded with poetry, makes of our lives a vast expanse, quick with sensation, on which that person and ourselves are ever more or less in contact.”

— Marcel Proust

280. “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

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

— Marcel Proust

282. “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

283. “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

284. “Just is not by other men of intelligence that an intelligent an is afraid of being thought a fool, so it is not by the great gentleman but by boors and ‘bounders’ that a man of fashion is afraid of finding his social value underrated. Three-fourths of the mental ingenuity displayed, of the social falsehoods scattered broadcast ever since the world began by people whose importance they have served only to diminish, have been aimed at inferiors.”

— Marcel Proust

285. “Now, since the self is constantly thinking numerous things, since it is nothing more than the thoughts of these things, when by chance, instead of having them as the objects of its attention, it suddenly turns its thoughts upon itself, it finds only an empty apparatus, something unfamiliar, to which, in order to give it some reality – it adds the memory of a face seen in a mirror.”

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

— Marcel Proust

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

— Marcel Proust

289. “People who laugh so heartily at what they themselves have said, when it is not funny, dispense us accordingly, by taking upon themselves the responsibility for the mirth, from joining in it.”

— Marcel Proust

290. “Dreams are not to be converted into reality, that we know; we would not form any, perhaps, were it not for desire, and it is useful to us to form them in order to see them fail and to be instructed by their failure.”

— Marcel Proust

291. “I would fall asleep again, and thereafter would reawaken for short snatches only, just long enough to hear the regular creaking of the wainscot, or to open my eyes to stare at the shifting kaleidoscope of the darkness, to savour, in a momentary glimmer of consciousness, the sleep which lay heavy upon the furniture, the room, that whole of which I formed no more than a small part and whose insensibility I should very soon return to share.”

— Marcel Proust

292. “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

293. “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

294. “According to a charming law of nature which is evident even in the most sophisticated societies, we live in complete ignorance of whatever we love.”

— Marcel Proust

295. “It is the same in life: the heart changes, and that is our worst misfortune, but we learn of it only from reading or by imagination, for in reality its alteration, like that of certain natural phenomena, is so gradual that even if we are able to distinguish successively each of its different states, we are still spared the actual sensation of change.”

— Marcel Proust

296. “We would like the truth to be revealed to us by novel signs, not by a sentence, a sentence similar to those which we have constantly repeated to ourselves. The habit of thinking prevents us at times from experiencing reality, immunises us against it, makes it seem no more than another thought. There is no idea that does not carry in itself its possible refutation, no word that does not imply its opposite.”

— Marcel Proust

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

— Marcel Proust

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

— Marcel Proust

299. “In theory one is aware that the earth revolves, but in practice one does not perceive it, the ground upon which one treads seems not to move, and one can live undisturbed. So it is with Time in one’s life.”

— Marcel Proust

300. “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