Quotes By Marcel Proust

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

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

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.

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

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.

The charms of the passing woman are generally in direct proportion to the swiftness of her passing.

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.

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

Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.

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.

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

It is in moments of illness that we are compelled to recognize that we live not alone but chained to a creature of a different kingdom, whole worlds apart, who has no knowledge of us and by whom it is impossible to make ourselves understood: our body.

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.

Habit is a second nature which prevents us from knowing the first, of which it has neither the cruelties nor the enchantments.

The world was not created once and for all time for each of us individually. There are added to it in the course of our life things of which we have never had any suspicion.

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.

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.

Lies are essential to humanity. They are perhaps as important as the pursuit of pleasure and moreover are dictated by that pursuit.

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

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

Let us leave pretty women to men devoid of imagination.

There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book.

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