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Marcel Proust

Marcel Proust Quotes

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Famous Marcel Proust Quotes

“Conversation, which is friendship's mode of expression, is a superficial digression which gives us nothing worth acquiring. We may talk for a lifetime without doing more than indefinitely repeat the vacuity of a minute.”

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Book:In Search of Lost Time, Volume II: Within a Budding Grove (A Modern Library E-Book)
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“It is the wicked deception of love that it begins by making us dwell not upon a woman in the outside world but upon a doll inside our head, the only woman who is always available in fact, the only one we shall ever possess, whom the arbitrary nature of memory, almost as absolute as that of the imagination, may have made as different from the real woman as the real Balbec had been from the Balbec I imagined- a dummy creation that little by little, to our own detriment, we shall force the real woman to resemble.”

WorldMayLittlesMadeDifferentRealFactsForceImaginationMemoriesCreationAbsolutesAvailableDeceptionWickedArbitraryDollsOutside WorldDummyReal Women
Book:The Guermantes Way
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“The fact of the matter is that, since we are determined always to keep our feelings to ourselves, we have never given any thought to the manner in which we should express them. And suddenly there is within us a strange and obscene animal making itself heard, whose tones may inspire as much alarm in the person who receives the involuntary, elliptical and almost irresistible communication of one's defect or vice as would the sudden avowal indirectly and outlandishly proffered by a criminal who can no longer refrain from confessing to a murder of which one had never imagined him to be guilty.”

ShouldMayPersonsMatterFactsFeelingsGivenAnimalEmotionHeardInspireStrangeCommunicationMurderVicesDeterminedCriminalsGuiltyToneDefectsAlarmsIrresistibleRefrainObsceneInvoluntaryConfessing
Book:In Search of Lost Time, Volume III: The Guermantes Way
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“The truth has no need to be uttered to be made apparent, and ... one may perhaps gather it with more certainty, without waiting for words and without even taking any account of them, from countless outward signs, even from certain invisible phenomena, analogous in the sphere of human character to what atmospheric changes are in the physical world.”

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Book:In Search of Lost Time, Volume III: The Guermantes Way
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“A man may have spent his life among the great ones of the earth, who to him have been merely boring relatives or tedious acquaintances because a familiarity engendered in the cradle had stripped them of all glamour in his eyes.”

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Book:In Search of Lost Time, Volume IV: Sodom and Gomorrah (A Modern Library E-Book)
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“We may, indeed, say that the hour of death is uncertain, but when we say this we think of that hour as situated in a vague and remote expanse of time; it does not occur to us that it can have any connexion with the day that has already dawned and can mean that death -- or its first assault and partial possession of us, after which it will never leave hold of us again -- may occur this very afternoon, so far from uncertain, this afternoon whose time-table, hour by hour, has been settled in advance.”

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Author:Marcel Proust
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“In times like ours, where the growing complexity of life leaves us barely the time to read the newspapers, where the map of Europehas endured profound rearrangements and is perhaps on the brink of enduring yet others, where so many threatening and new problems appear everywhere, you will admit it may be demanded of a writer that he be more than a fine wit who makes us forget in idle and byzantine discussions on the merits of pure form.”

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Author:Marcel Proust
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“The reason why life may be judged to be trivial although at certain moments it seems to us so beautiful is that we form our judgment, ordinarily, not on the evidence of life itself but of those quite different images which preserve nothing of life-and therefore we judge it disparagingly.”

MayDifferentReasonMomentsSeemsBeautifulFormCertainJudgingJudgmentEvidencePreservesReason WhyJudged
Book:In Search of Lost Time, Volume VI: Time Regained (A Modern Library E-Book)
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“We passionately long that there may be another life in which we shall be similar to what we are here below. But we do not pause to reflect that, even without waiting for that other life, in this life, after a few years we are unfaithful to what we have been, to what we wished to remain immortally.”

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Book:Delphi Complete Works of Marcel Proust (Illustrated)
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“The great renunciation of old age as it prepared for death, wraps itself up in its chrysalis, which may be observed at the end of lives that are at all prolonged, even in old lovers who have lived for one another, in old friends bound by the closest ties of mutual sympathy, who, after a certain year, cease to make the necessary journey or even to cross the street to see one another, cease to correspond, and know that they will communicate no more in this world.”

KnowsWorldYearsMayEndsAgeCertainJourneyStreetsThis WorldLoversCrossesPreparedBoundsCommunicateCeaseOld AgeTiesMutualClosestWrapsOld FriendsRenunciationEnd Of LifeOld LoveChrysalis
Book:In Search of Lost Time, Volume I: Swann's Way (A Modern Library E-Book)
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“Facts do not find their way into the world in which our beliefs reside; they did not produce our beliefs, they do not destroy them; they may inflict on them the most constant refutations without weakening them, and an avalanche of afflictions or ailments succeeding one another without interruption in a family will not make it doubt the goodness of its God or the talent of its doctor.”

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Book:In Search of Lost Time: Way by Swann's
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“For everyone who, having no artistic sense-that is to say, no submission to subjective reality-may have the knack of reasoning about art till doomsday, especially if he be, in addition, a diplomat or financier in contact with the 'realities' of the present day, is only too ready to believe literature is an intellectual game which is destined to gradually be abandoned as time goes on.”

IfsBelieveMayArtRealityLiteratureGamesReadyGoes OnIntellectualContactArtisticReasoningAbandonedDestinedSubmissionSubjectivePresent DayDiplomatsKnackDoomsdayTime Goes OnFinanciers
Author:Marcel Proust
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“Medicine being a compendium of the successive and contradictory mistakes of medical practitioners, when we summon the wisest of them to our aid, the chances are that we may be relying on a scientific truth the error of which will be recognized in a few years time.”

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Book:In Search of Lost Time: The Guermantes way
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“A collection of bad love songs, tattered from overuse, has to touch us like a cemetery or a village. So what if the houses have no style, if the graves are vanishing under tasteless ornaments and inscriptions? Before an imagination sympathetic and respectful enough to conceal momentarily its aesthetic disdain, that dust may release a flock of souls, their beaks holding the still verdant dreams that gave them an inkling of the next world and let them rejoice or weep in this world.”

IfsWorldMayStillsSoulEnoughDreamSongNextHouseImaginationStyleThis WorldGravesDustReleaseCollectionsWhat IfVillageRejoiceAestheticRespectfulSympatheticFlocksCemeteryOrnamentsDisdainVanishingInscriptionsBeaksBad Love
Book:The Complete Short Stories of Marcel Proust
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