Marcel Proust Quotes

Let us leave pretty women to men devoid of imagination.

The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.

There is no man, however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived in a way the consciousness of which is so unpleasant to him in later life that he would gladly, if he could, expunge it from his memory.

Those whose suffering is due to love are, as we say of certain invalids, their own physicians.

Three-quarters of the sicknesses of intelligent people come from their intelligence. They need at least a doctor who can understand this sickness.

Time passes, and little by little everything that we have spoken in falsehood becomes true.

Time, which changes people, does not alter the image we have retained of them.

We are able to find everything in our memory, which is like a dispensary or chemical laboratory in which chance steers our hand sometimes to a soothing drug and sometimes to a dangerous poison.

We are healed from suffering only by experiencing it to the full.

We become moral when we are unhappy.

We do not succeed in changing things according to our desire, but gradually our desire changes.

We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.

We must never be afraid to go too far, for truth lies beyond.

What a profound significance small things assume when the woman we love conceals them from us.

Words do not change their meanings so drastically in the course of centuries as, in our minds, names do in the course of a year or two.

Your soul is a dark forest. But the trees are of a particular species, they are genealogical trees.

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.

Let us be grateful to people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.

I perceived that to express those impressions, to write that essential book, which is the only true one, a great writer does not, in the current meaning of the word, invent it, but, since it exists already in each one of us, interprets it. The duty and the task of a writer are those of an interpreter.

If only for the sake of elegance, I try to remain morally pure.

Illness is the doctor to whom we pay most heed; to kindness, to knowledge, we make promise only; pain we obey.

It is always during a passing state of mind that we make lasting resolutions.

The paradoxes of today are the prejudices of tomorrow, since the most benighted and the most deplorable prejudices have had their moment of novelty when fashion lent them its fragile grace.

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.

The time at our disposal each day is elastic; the passions we feel dilate it, those that inspire us shrink it, and habit fills it.