Marcel Proust quotes

Marcel Proust was a French novelist, essayist, and critic, celebrated for his monumental work "In Search of Lost Time." His writing explores memory, time, and the complexities of human experience. He remains one of the most influential figures in twentieth-century literature. Here are 136 of his quotes:

Love is space and time made tender to the heart.

Marcel Proust

We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it in full.

Marcel Proust

Like everybody who is not in love, he thought one chose the person to be loved after endless deliberations and on the basis of particular qualities or advantages.

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

Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and composed our masterpieces.

Marcel Proust

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

Marcel Proust

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

Marcel Proust

The only true voyage of discovery is not to go to new places, but to have other eyes.

Marcel Proust

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.

Marcel Proust

What artists call posterity is the posterity of the work of art.

Marcel Proust

The bonds between ourselves and another person exists only in our minds. Memory as it grows fainter loosens them, and notwithstanding the illusion by which we want to be duped and which, out of love, friendship, politeness, deference, duty, we dupe other people, we exist alone. Man is the creature who cannot escape from himself, who knows other people only in himself, and when he asserts the contrary, he is lying.

Marcel Proust

In his younger days a man dreams of possessing the heart of the woman whom he loves later, the feeling that he possesses the heart of a woman may be enough to make him fall in love with her.

Marcel Proust

It is always thus, impelled by a state of mind which is destined not to last, that we make our irrevocable decisions.

Marcel Proust

I shall not find a painting more beautiful because the artist has painted a hawthorn in the foreground, though I know of nothing more beautiful than the hawthorn, for I wish to remain sincere and because I know that the beauty of a painting does not depend on the things represented in it. I shall not collect images of hawthorn. I do not venerate hawthorn, I go to see and smell it.

Marcel Proust

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

Marcel Proust

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

Marcel Proust

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.

Marcel Proust

Only through art can we get outside of ourselves and know another's view of the universe.

Marcel Proust

Adultery breathes new life into marriages which have been left for dead.

Marcel Proust

A sort of egotistical self-evaluation is unavoidable in those joys in which erudition and art mingle and in which aesthetic pleasure may become more acute, but not remain as pure.

Marcel Proust

Fashions, being themselves begotten of the desire for change, are quick to change also.

Marcel Proust

Our virtues themselves are not free and floating qualities over which we retain a permanent control and power of disposal; they come to be so closely linked in our minds with the actions in conjunction with which we make it our duty to practice them, that, if we are suddenly called upon to perform some action of a different order, it takes us by surprise, and without our supposing for a moment that it might involve the bringing of those very same virtues into play.

Marcel Proust