Top 500 Marcel Proust Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “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

352. “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

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

— Marcel Proust

354. “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

355. “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

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

— Marcel Proust

357. “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

358. “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

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

— Marcel Proust

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

— Marcel Proust

361. “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

362. “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

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

— Marcel Proust

364. “The sea refreshes our imagination because it does not make us think of human life; yet it rejoices the soul, because, like the soul, it is an infinite and impotent striving, a strength that is ceaselessly broken by falls, an eternal and exquisite lament.”

— Marcel Proust

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

— Marcel Proust

366. “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

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

— Marcel Proust

368. “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

369. “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

370. “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

371. “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

372. “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

373. “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

374. “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

375. “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

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

— Marcel Proust

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

— Marcel Proust

378. “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

379. “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

380. “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

381. “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

382. “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

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

— Marcel Proust

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

— Marcel Proust

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

— Marcel Proust

386. “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

387. “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

388. “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

389. “And yet one did not find in the speech of Bergotte a certain luminosity which in his books, as in those of some other writers, often modified in the written phrase the appearance of its words. This was doubtless because that light issues from so profound a depth that its rays do not penetrate to our spoken words in the hours in which, thrown open to others by the act of conversation, we are to a certain extent closed against ourselves.”

— Marcel Proust

390. “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

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

— Marcel Proust

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

— Marcel Proust

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

— Marcel Proust

394. “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

395. “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

396. “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

397. “Those exterminating angels known as Will and Thought were no longer present to drive the evil spirits of his senses and the vile emanations of his memory back into the darkness.”

— Marcel Proust

398. “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

399. “When the successive hours of our life are thus displayed against too widely dissimilar backgrounds, we find that we give away too much of ourselves to all sorts of people who next day will not interest us in the least.”

— Marcel Proust

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

— Marcel Proust