Quotes by Marcel Proust

“You know Balbec so well - do you have friends in the area?'I have friends wherever there are companies of trees, wounded but not vanquished, which huddle together with touching obstinacy to implore...”

“Love is a striking example of how little reality means to us.”

“Now there is one thing I can tell you: you will enjoy certain pleasures you would not fathom now. When you still had your mother you often thought of the days when you would have her no longer. Now...”

“... there was no need for him to hasten towards the attainment of a happiness already captured and held in a safe place, which would not escape his grasp again.”

“My destination is no longer a place, rather a new way of seeing.”

“Much that for us is fraught with with happiness or misery, remains almost unnoticed by the rest of the world.”

“People do not die for us immediately, but remain bathed in a sort of aura oflife which bears no relation to true immortality but through which theycontinue to occupy our thoughts in the same way as...”

“... the idea that 'Life' contains situations more interesting and more romantic than all the romances ever written.”

“He suffered greatly from being shut up among all these people whose stupidity and absurdities wounded him all the more cruelly since, being ignorant of his love, incapable, had they known of it, of...”

“We have such numerous interests in our lives that it is not uncommon, on a single occasion, for the foundations of a happiness that does not yet exist to be laid down alongside the intensification ...”

“One says the things which one feels the need to say, and which the other will not understand: one speaks for oneself alone.”

“She observed the dumb-show by which her neighbour was expressing her passion for music, but she refrained from copying it. This was not to say that, for once that she had consented to spend a few m...”

“We needed germans in Paris to hear Wagner.”

“We don't receive wisdom we must discover it for ourselves.”

“We may, indeed, say that the hour of death is uncertain, but when we say so we represent that hour to ourselves as situated in a vague and remote expanse of time, it never occurs to us that it can ...”

“I put down my cup and examine my own mind. It is for it to discover the truth. But how? What an abyss of uncertainty whenever the mind feels that some part of it has strayed beyond its own borders;...”

“... Error, by force of contrast, enhances the triumph of Truth...”

“Why did you not forget your heart also? I should never have let you have that back." ...”

“It is not because other people are dead that our affection for them grows faint, it is because we ourselves are dying.”

“I think that life would suddenly seem wonderful to us if we were threatened to die as you say. Just think of how many projects, travels, love affairs, studies, itour lifehides from us, made invisib...”