Top 500 Marcel Proust Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “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

352. “I felt even disappointed when he resumed the thread of his narrative.”

— Marcel Proust

353. “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

354. “We fear more than the loss of anything else the disappearance of possessions that have remained outside ourselves, because our hearts have not taken possession of them.”

— Marcel Proust

355. “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

356. “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

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

— Marcel Proust

358. “Homosexuals would be the best husbands in the world if they did not put on an act of loving other women.”

— Marcel Proust

359. “That girl whom I never saw save dappled with the shadows of their leaves, was to me herself a plant of local growth, only taller than the rest, and one whose structure would enable me to approach more closely than in them to the intimate savour of the land from which she had sprung.”

— Marcel Proust

360. “But the absolute control over his facial muscles to which M. de Norpois had attained allowed him to listen without seeming to hear a word.”

— Marcel Proust

361. “I believe that all true art is classic, but the dictates of the mind rarely permit of its being recognized as such when it first appears.”

— Marcel Proust

362. “So long as I know what’s boiling in my pot I don’t bother my head about what’s in other people’s.”

— Marcel Proust

363. “Unlike the earth, the sea is not separated from the sky; it always harmonizes with the colors of the sky and it is deeply stirred by its most delicate nuances. The sea radiates under the sun and seems to die with it every evening. And when the sun has vanished, the sea keeps longing for it, keeps preserving a bit of its luminous reminiscence in the face of the uniformly somber earth.”

— Marcel Proust

364. “As a man with imagination you can enjoy only in regret or in anticipation – that is, in the past or in the future.”

— Marcel Proust

365. “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

366. “I loved her; I was sorry not to have had the time and the inspiration to insult her, to do her some injury, to force her to keep some memory of me.”

— Marcel Proust

367. “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

368. “Real life, life finally uncovered and clarified, the only life in consequence lived to the full, is literature. Life in this sense dwells within all ordinary people as much as the artist. But they do not see it because they are not trying to shed light on it.”

— Marcel Proust

369. “Because of the infinite quality of love, or its egotism, the intellectual and spiritual physiognomy of the people we love are the least objectively defined for us. We are constantly retouching them to suit our desires and our fears; we do not separate them from us; they are but an immense and vague place where our affections exteriorize themselves.”

— Marcel Proust

370. “Most of our faculties lie dormant because they can rely upon Habit, which knows what there is to be done and has no need of their services.”

— Marcel Proust

371. “Fashions, being themselves begotten of the desire for change, are quick to change also.”

— Marcel Proust

372. “It is only with the passions of others that we are ever really familiar, and what we come to discover about our own can only be learned from them.”

— Marcel Proust

373. “Wars are fought for the benefit of oligarchs, triumphs bought with the blood of peons.”

— Marcel Proust

374. “After luncheon the sun, conscious that it was Saturday, would blaze an hour longer in the zenith,...”

— Marcel Proust

375. “Everything that seems imperishable tends to extinguishment.”

— Marcel Proust

376. “For a young man has strong imagination but poor judgment, so that he imagines others to be as big as he is but considers himself to be very small. He has unbounded trust in the universe but is constantly unsure of himself.”

— Marcel Proust

377. “There are optical errors in time as there are in space.”

— Marcel Proust

378. “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

379. “Under each station of the real, another glimmers.”

— Marcel Proust

380. “What artists call posterity is the posterity of the work of art.”

— Marcel Proust

381. “The disgust of distinguished people for snobs who want to force themselves upon them, the virile man has for the invert, the woman for every man who is too much in love with her.”

— Marcel Proust

382. “But when his mistress for the time being was a woman in society, or at least one whose birth was not so lowly, nor her position is so irregular that he was unable to arrange for her reception in ‘society,’ then for her sake he would return to it, but only to the particular orbit in which she moved or into which he had drawn her.”

— Marcel Proust

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

— Marcel Proust

384. “Aristocracy is a relative thing. And there are plenty of out-of-the-way places where the son of an upholsterer is the arbiter of fashion and reigns over a court like any young Prince of Wales.”

— Marcel Proust

385. “He had so long since ceased to direct his life toward any ideal goal, and had confined himself to the pursuit of quotidian satisfactions, that he had come to believe, though without ever formally stating his belief even to himself that he would remain all his life in that condition, which only death could alter.”

— Marcel Proust

386. “One reads the papers as one wants to with a bandage over one’s eyes without trying to understand the facts, listening to the soothing words of the editor as to the words of one s mistress.”

— Marcel Proust

387. “One wants to be understood because one wants to be loved, and one wants to be loved because one loves.”

— Marcel Proust

388. “Sometimes in the afternoon sky the moon would pass white as a cloud, furtive, lusterless, like an actress who does not have to perform yet and who, from the audience, in street clothes, watches the other actors for a moment, making herself inconspicuous, not wanting anyone to pay attention to her.”

— Marcel Proust

389. “Gardeners produce flowers that are delicious dreams, and others too that are like nightmares.”

— Marcel Proust

390. “More than anything else the viscount’s sad, sweet gaze made the boy feel like crying. Alexis knew that those eyes had always been sad and, even in the happiest moments, they seemed to implore a consolation for sufferings that he did not appear to experience. But at this moment Alexis believed that his uncle’s sadness, courageously banished from his conversation, had taken refuge in his eyes, which, along with his sunken cheeks, were the only sincere things about his entire person.”

— Marcel Proust

391. “One can seldom admire what one loves.”

— Marcel Proust

392. “With women who do not love us, as with the “dear departed,” the knowledge that there is no hope left does not prevent us from continuing to wait.”

— Marcel Proust

393. “A work in which there are theories is like an object which still has the ticket that shows its price.”

— Marcel Proust

394. “There are few who are worthy to understand what I feel... I seek out those who are of this chosen few, and I avoid the rest.”

— Marcel Proust

395. “For the most dangerous of all forms of concealment is that of the crime itself in the mind of the guilty party. His permanent consciousness of it prevents him from imagining how generally it is unknown, how readily a complete lie would be accepted, and on the other hand from realising at what degree of truth other people will detect, in words which he believes to be innocent, a confession.”

— Marcel Proust

396. “Our passions shape our books, repose writes them in the intervals.”

— Marcel Proust

397. “We must love men more than things, and I admire and weep more for the soldiers than for the churches which were only the recording of an heroic gesture which today is reenacted at every moment.”

— Marcel Proust

398. “Sometimes it would even happen that this precocious hour would sound two strokes more than the last; there must then have been an hour which I had not heard strike; something which had taken place had not taken place for me; the fascination of my book, a magic as potent as the deepest slumber, had stopped my enchanted ears and had obliterated the sound of that golden bell from the azure surface of the enveloping silence.”

— Marcel Proust

399. “These were happy, cheerful moments, innocent in appearance but hiding the growing possibility of disaster: this is what makes the life of lovers the most unpredictable of all, a life in which it can rain sulphur and pitch a moment after the sunniest spell and where, without having the courage to learn from our misfortunes, we immediately start building again on the slopes of the crater which can only spew out catastrophe.”

— Marcel Proust

400. “In his younger days a man dreams of possessing the heart of the woman whom he loves; later, the feeling that he possesses the heart of a woman may be enough to make him fall in love with her.”

— Marcel Proust