Quotes By Marcel Proust

A change in the weather is sufficient to recreate the world and ourselves.

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

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

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

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

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

Let us leave pretty women to men devoid of imagination.

Like many intellectuals, he was incapable of saying a simple thing in a simple way.

In a separation it is the one who is not really in love who says the more tender things.

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

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.

People wish to learn to swim and at the same time to keep one foot on the ground.

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

The bonds that unite another person to our self exist only in our mind.

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.

As long as men are free to ask what they must, free to say what they think, free to think what they will, freedom can never be lost and science can never regress.

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

A woman one loves rarely suffices for all our needs, so we deceive her with another whom we do not love.

All our final decisions are made in a state of mind that is not going to last.

The only paradise is paradise lost.

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

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

Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.

A fashionable milieu is one in which everybody's opinion is made up of the opinion of all the others. Has everybody a different opinion? Then it is a literary milieu.

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

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

Only through art can we emerge from ourselves and know what another person sees.

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.

In theory one is aware that the earth revolves, but in practice one does not perceive it, the ground upon which one treads seems not to move, and one can live undisturbed. So it is with Time in one's life.

Love is a reciprocal torture.