For even if we have the sensation of being always surrounded by our own soul, it is not as though by a motionless prison: rather, we are in some sense borne along with it in a perpetual leap to go beyond it. - Marcel Proust
Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were. - Marcel Proust
Reading is at the threshold of the spiritual life; it can introduce us to it. It does not constitute it ... There are certain cases of spiritual depression in which reading can become a sort of curative discipline ... reintroducing a lazy mind into the life of the Spirit. - Marcel Proust
One of a hostess's duties is to act as procuress. - Marcel Proust
Let us be grateful to people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom. - Marcel Proust
We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full. - Marcel Proust
l'oubli dont je commençais à sentir la force et qui est un si puissant instrument d'adaptation à la réalité parce qu'il détruit peu à peu le passé survivant qui est en constante contradiction avec elle. - Marcel Proust
We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us. - Marcel Proust
The fixity of a habit is generally in direct proportion to its absurdity. - Marcel Proust
The inertia of the mind urges it to slide down the easy slope of imagination, rather than to climb the steep slope of introspection. - Marcel Proust
Only through art can we get outside of ourselves and know another's view of the universe. - Marcel Proust
... Odette seemed a fascinating and desirable woman, the attraction which her body held for him had aroused a painful longing to secure the absolute mastery of even the tiniest particles of her heart. - Marcel Proust
La vera terra dei barbari non è quella che non ha mai conosciuto l’arte, ma quella che, disseminata di capolavori, non sa né apprezzarli né conservarli. - Marcel Proust
The best vaccine against anger is to watch others in its throes. - Marcel Proust
Let us be grateful to people who make us happy: They are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom. - Marcel Proust
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes. - Marcel Proust
So few are the easy victories as the ultimate failures. - Marcel Proust
It is grief that develops the powers of the mind. - Marcel Proust
We needed germans in Paris to hear Wagner. - Marcel Proust
If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time. - Marcel Proust
The charms of a passing woman are usually in direct relation to the speed of her passing. - Marcel Proust
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 when they were alive. Itis as though they were traveling abroad. - Marcel Proust
For in this world of ours where everything withers, everything perishes, there is a thing that decays, that crumbles into dust even more completely, leaving behind still fewer traces of itself, than beauty: namely grief. - Marcel Proust
The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes. - Marcel Proust
One says the things which one feels the need to say, and which the other will not understand: one speaks for oneself alone. - Marcel Proust
It is a mistake to speak of a bad choice in love, since as soon as a choice exists, it can only be bad. - Marcel Proust
All our final decisions are made in a state of mind that is not going to last. - Marcel Proust
But,instead of what our imagination makes us suppose and which we worthless try to discover,life gives us something that we could hardly imagine. - Marcel Proust
Everything that seems imperishable tends to extinguishment. - Marcel Proust
My destination is no longer a place, rather a new way of seeing. - Marcel Proust
The fault I find with our journalism is that it forces us to take an interest in some fresh triviality or other every day, whereas only three or four books in a lifetime give us anything that is of real importance. - Marcel Proust
The one thing more difficult than following a regimen is not imposing it on others. - Marcel Proust
We are healed from suffering only by experiencing it to the full. - Marcel Proust
She's got feet like boats, whiskers like an American, and her undies are filthy. - Marcel Proust
It is the tragedy of other people that they are merely showcases for the very perishable collections of one's own mind. - Marcel Proust
Une œuvre où il y a des théories est comme un objet sur lequel on laisse la marque du prix. - Marcel Proust
It is always thus, impelled by a state of mind which is destined not to last, we make our irrevocable decisions - Marcel Proust
Having a body is in itself the greatest threat to the mind... The body encloses the mind in a fortress; before long the mind is besieged on all sides, and in the end the mind has to give itself up. - Marcel Proust
We have nothing to fear and a great deal to learn from trees, that vigorours and pacific tribe which without stint produces strengthening essences for us, soothing balms, and in whose gracious company we spend so many cool, silent, and intimate hours. - Marcel Proust
So we don't believe that life is beautiful because we don't recall it but if we get a whiff of a long-forgotten smell we are suddenly intoxicated and similarly we think we no longer love the dead because we don't remember them but if by chance we come across an old glove we burst into tears. - Marcel Proust
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. - Marcel Proust
Desire makes everything blossom; possession makes everything wither and fade. - Marcel Proust
There is no one, no matter how wise he is, who has not in his youth said things or done things that are so unpleasant to recall in later life that he would expunge them entirely from his memory if that were possible. - Marcel Proust
... which would enable him to prolong for the time being, and to renew for one day more the disappointment, the torturing deception that must always come to him with the vain presence of this woman, whom he might approach, yet never dared embrace. - Marcel Proust
The only paradise is paradise lost. - Marcel Proust
We feel in one world, we think and name in another. Between the two we can set up a system of references, but we cannot fill in the gap. - Marcel Proust
Reading is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude. - Marcel Proust
Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom. - Marcel Proust
When nothing else subsists from the past, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered...the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls...bearing resiliently, on tiny and almost impalpable drops of their essence, the immense edifice of memory - Marcel Proust
We don't receive wisdom we must discover it for ourselves. - Marcel Proust
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes. - Marcel Proust
The real voyage of discovery consists, not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes. - Marcel Proust