Top 500 Marcel Proust Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “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

352. “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

353. “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

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

— Marcel Proust

355. “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

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

— Marcel Proust

357. “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

358. “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

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

— Marcel Proust

360. “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

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. “And so when studying faces, we do indeed measure them, but as painters, not as surveyors.”

— Marcel Proust

363. “My only consolation when I am really sad is to love and to be loved.”

— Marcel Proust

364. “We accept so many commitments in regard to life that a time comes when, despairing of ever managing to fulfill them all, we face the graves, we call upon death, “death, which brings help to destinies that have trouble coming true.” But while death may exempt us from commitments we have made in regard to life, it cannot exempt us from our commitments to ourselves, especially the most important one: namely, the commitment to live in order to be worthy and deserving.”

— Marcel Proust

365. “An impression is for the writer what an experiment is for the scientist, except that for the scientist the work of the intelligence precedes it, and for the writer it comes afterwards.”

— Marcel Proust

366. “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

367. “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

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

— Marcel Proust

369. “It is false to believe that the scale of fears corresponds to that of the dangers which inspire them. One might be frightened of sleeplessness and yet not of a duel, of a rat and not of a lion.”

— Marcel Proust

370. “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

371. “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

372. “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

373. “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

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

— Marcel Proust

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

— Marcel Proust

Featured in: Real Quotes

376. “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

377. “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

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

— Marcel Proust

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

— Marcel Proust

380. “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

381. “Nobility is often no more than the inner aspect which our egotistical feelings assume when we have not yet named and classified them.”

— Marcel Proust

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

— Marcel Proust

383. “What we feel is the only thing that exists for us, and we project it into the past, into the future, without letting ourselves be stopped by the fictitious barriers of death.”

— Marcel Proust

384. “So what I had believed to be nothing to me was simply my entire life. How ignorant one is of oneself.”

— Marcel Proust

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

— Marcel Proust

386. “May my life someday be so limpid that the Muses will deign to mirror themselves in it and that we can see the reflections of their smiles and their dances skimming across its surface.”

— Marcel Proust

387. “My grandmother had a love which found in me so totally its complement, its goal, its constant lodestar, that the genius of great men, all the genius that might ever have existed from the beginning of the world, would have been less precious to my grandmother than a single one of my defects.”

— Marcel Proust

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

— Marcel Proust

389. “And it is perhaps one of the causes of our perpetual disappointments in love, this perpetual displacement whereby, in response to our expectation of the ideal person whom we love, each meeting provides us with a person in flesh and blood who yet contains so little trace of our dream.”

— Marcel Proust

390. “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

391. “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

392. “We forgive the crimes of individuals, but not their participation in a collective crime.”

— Marcel Proust

393. “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

394. “Like a fruit hidden among its leaves, which has grown and ripened unobserved by man, until it falls of its own accord, there came upon us one night the kitchen-maid’s confinement.”

— Marcel Proust

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

— Marcel Proust

Featured in: Book Quotes

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

— Marcel Proust

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

— Marcel Proust

398. “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

399. “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

400. “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