Top 500 Marcel Proust Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “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

302. “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

303. “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

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

— Marcel Proust

305. “It was impossible for me to thank my father; what he called my sentimentality would have exasperated him.”

— Marcel Proust

306. “But old age, to begin with, has something in common with death. Some face it with indifference, not because they have more courage than others, but because they have less imagination.”

— Marcel Proust

307. “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

308. “The flowers which played then among the grass, the water which rippled past in the sunshine, the whole landscape which served as environment to their apparition lingers around the memory of them still with its unconscious or unheeding air;...”

— Marcel Proust

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

— Marcel Proust

Featured in: Reading Quotes

310. “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

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

— Marcel Proust

312. “If the idea of death during this period had, as we have seen, cast a gloom over love, the memory of love had for a long time now helped me not to be afraid of death. For I understood that dying was not something new but quite the reverse, that since my childhood I had already died a number of times.”

— Marcel Proust

313. “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

314. “We only really know what is new, what suddenly introduces to our sensibility a change of tone which strikes us, that for which habit has not yet substituted its pale fac-similes.”

— Marcel Proust

315. “I was left alone there in the company of the orchids, roses and violets, which, like people waiting beside you who do not know you, preserved a silence which their individuality as living things made all the more striking, and warmed themselves in the heat of a glowing coal fire...”

— Marcel Proust

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

— Marcel Proust

317. “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

318. “Will it ultimately reach the clear surface of my consciousness, this memory, this old, dead moment which the magnetism of an identical moment has travelled so far to importune, to disturb, to raise up out of the very depths of my being? I cannot tell. Now that I feel nothing, it has stopped, has perhaps gone down again into its darkness, from which who can say whether it will ever rise?”

— Marcel Proust

319. “From the pavement, I could see the window of Albertine’s room, that window, formerly quite black, at night, when she was not staying in the house, which the electric light inside, dissected by the slats of the shutters, striped from top to bottom with parallel bars of gold.”

— Marcel Proust

320. “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

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

— Marcel Proust

322. “He lives at Balbec?” crooned the Baron in a tone so far from interrogatory that it is regrettable that the written language does not possess a sign other than the question mark to end such apparently unquestioning remarks. It is true that such a sign would be of little use except to M. de Charlus.”

— Marcel Proust

323. “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

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

— Marcel Proust

325. “Swann could at once detect in this story one of those fragments of literal truth which liars, when taken by surprise, console themselves by introducing into the composition of the falsehood which they have to invent, thinking that it can be safely incorporated, and will lend the whole story an air of verisimilitude.”

— Marcel Proust

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

— Marcel Proust

327. “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

328. “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

329. “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

330. “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

331. “A woman whom we need and who makes us suffer elicits from us a whole gamut of feelings far more profound and vital than a man of genius who interests us.”

— Marcel Proust

332. “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

333. “Words do not change their meanings so drastically in the course of centuries as, in our minds, names do in the course of a year or two.”

— Marcel Proust

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

— Marcel Proust

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

335. “I do my intellectual work inside myself, and once I am with my fellow creatures it is more or less a matter of indifference to me whether or not they are intelligent as long as they are kind, sincere, etc.”

— Marcel Proust

336. “He sat there silent, watching their love expire.”

— Marcel Proust

337. “How much farther does anguish penetrate in psychology than psychology itself!”

— Marcel Proust

338. “Things outside seemed also fixed in mute expectation, so as not to disturb the moonlight which, duplicating each of them and throwing it back by the extension, forwards, of a shadow denser and more concrete than its substance, had made the whole landscape seem at once thinner and longer, like a map which, after being folded up, is spread out upon the ground.”

— Marcel Proust

339. “The illusions of paternal love are perhaps no less poignant than those of the other kind; many daughters regard their fathers merely as the old men who leave their fortunes to them.”

— Marcel Proust

340. “I longed for nothing more than to behold a stormy sea, less as a mighty spectacle than as a momentary revelation of the true life of nature;.”

— Marcel Proust

341. “Our belief that a person takes part in an unknown life which his or her love would allow us to enter is, of all that love demands in order to come into being, what it prizes the most, and what makes it care little for the rest.”

— Marcel Proust

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

— Marcel Proust

343. “Knowledge of the thing cannot impede it; but at least we have the things we discover, if not in our hands, at least in thought, and there they are at your disposal, which inspires us to the illusory hope of enjoying a kind of dominion over them.”

— Marcel Proust

344. “How could all this fresh water of memories have spurted once again and flowed through my impure soul of today without getting soiled?”

— Marcel Proust

345. “In my most desperate moments, I have never conceived of anything more horrible than a law office.”

— Marcel Proust

346. “Unkind people imagine themselves to be inflicting pain on someone equally unkind.”

— Marcel Proust

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

— Marcel Proust

348. “Knowing a thing does not always mean preventing a thing, but at least the things we know, we hold, if not in our hands, at least in our minds where we can arrange them as we like, which gives us the illusion of a sort of power over them.”

— Marcel Proust

349. “The past not merely is not fugitive, it remains present.”

— Marcel Proust

350. “I thought nothing at all, but I felt an immense sadness, as when two parts of one’s past existence, which have been anchored near to one, and upon which one has perhaps been basing idly from day to day an unacknowledged hope, remove themselves finally, with a joyous flapping of pennants, for unknown destinations, like a pair of ships. As.”

— Marcel Proust