Top 500 Marcel Proust Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “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

252. “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

253. “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

254. “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

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

— Marcel Proust

256. “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

257. “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

258. “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

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

— Marcel Proust

260. “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

261. “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

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

— Marcel Proust

263. “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

264. “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

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

— Marcel Proust

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

— Marcel Proust

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

— Marcel Proust

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

— Marcel Proust

Featured in: Reading Quotes

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

— Marcel Proust

270. “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

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

271. “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

272. “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

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

— Marcel Proust

274. “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

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

— Marcel Proust

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

— Marcel Proust

277. “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

278. “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

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

— Marcel Proust

280. “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

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

— Marcel Proust

282. “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

283. “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

284. “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

285. “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

286. “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

287. “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

288. “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

289. “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

290. “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

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

— Marcel Proust

292. “To such beings, such fugitive beings, their own nature and our anxiety fasten wings. And even when they are with us the look in their eyes seems to warn us that they are about to take flight. The proof of this beauty itself, that wings add is that often, for us, the same person is alternately winged and wingless.”

— Marcel Proust

293. “We believe that we may change things around us to suit our desires, we believe this because otherwise we can see no acceptable solution. We do not think of the solution which occurs most frequently and which is also acceptable: when we do not manage to change things to suit our desires, but our desires gradually change. We become indifferent to a situation which we had hoped to change when we found it unbearable.”

— Marcel Proust

294. “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

295. “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

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

— Marcel Proust

297. “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

298. “To think that I wasted years of my life, that I wanted to die, that I felt my deepest love, for a woman who did not appeal to me, who was not my type!”

— Marcel Proust

299. “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

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

— Marcel Proust