Top 500 Marcel Proust Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “He sat there silent, watching their love expire.”

— Marcel Proust

352. “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

353. “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

354. “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

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

— Marcel Proust

356. “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

357. “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

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

— Marcel Proust

359. “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

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

— Marcel Proust

361. “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

362. “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

363. “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

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

— Marcel Proust

365. “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

366. “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

367. “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

368. “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

369. “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

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

— Marcel Proust

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

— Marcel Proust

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

— Marcel Proust

373. “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

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

— Marcel Proust

375. “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

376. “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

377. “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

378. “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

379. “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

380. “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

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

— Marcel Proust

382. “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

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

— Marcel Proust

384. “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

385. “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

386. “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

387. “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

388. “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

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

— Marcel Proust

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

— Marcel Proust

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

— Marcel Proust

393. “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

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

— Marcel Proust

395. “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

396. “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

397. “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

398. “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

399. “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

400. “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