Top 500 Marcel Proust Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “I wished to see storms only on those coasts where they raged with most violence...”

— Marcel Proust

302. “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

303. “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

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

— Marcel Proust

305. “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

306. “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

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

— Marcel Proust

308. “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

309. “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

310. “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

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

— Marcel Proust

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

— Marcel Proust

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

— Marcel Proust

314. “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

315. “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

316. “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

317. “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

318. “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

319. “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

320. “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

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

— Marcel Proust

322. “The bonds that unite us to another human being are sanctified when he or she adopts the same point of view as ourselves in judging one of our imperfections.”

— Marcel Proust

323. “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

324. “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

325. “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

326. “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

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

— 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. “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

330. “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

331. “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

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

— Marcel Proust

333. “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

334. “Lies are essential to humanity. They are perhaps as important as the pursuit of pleasure and moreover are dictated by that pursuit.”

— Marcel Proust

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

— Marcel Proust

336. “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

337. “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

338. “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

339. “When Jean and his mother left Etreuilles, Monsieur Sureau had gathered for them great boxfuls of hawthorn and of snowballs which Madame Santeuil had not the courage to refuse. But, as soon as Jean’s uncle had gone home, she threw them away, saying that they already had more than enough in the way of luggage. And then Jean cried because he had been separated from the darling creatures which he would have liked to take with him to Paris, and because of his mother’s naughtiness.”

— Marcel Proust

340. “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

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

— Marcel Proust

342. “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

343. “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

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

— Marcel Proust

345. “It smells all right; it makes your head go round; it catches your breath; you feel ticklish all over – and not the faintest clue how it’s done. The man’s a sorcerer; the thing’s a conjuring trick, it’s a miracle,“...”

— Marcel Proust

346. “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

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

— Marcel Proust

348. “Knowing does not always allow us to prevent, but at least the things that we know, we hold them, if not in our hands, but at leastin our thoughts where we may dispose of them at our whim, which gives us the illusion of power over them.”

— Marcel Proust

349. “For theories and schools, like microbes and corpuscles, devour one another and by their strife ensure the continuity of life.”

— Marcel Proust

350. “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