Marcel Proust quotes - page 5

Pleasures are like photographs: in the presence of the person we love, we take only negatives, which we develop later, at home, when we have at our disposal once more our inner dark room, the door of which it is strictly forbidden to open while others are present. (Marcel Proust)
The one thing more difficult than following a regime is keeping from imposing it on others. View quote
Marcel Proust
When, from a long distant past, nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, still, alone, more fragile, but with more vitality, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste of things remain poised for a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest and bear unfaltering ... the vast structure of recollection. View quote
Marcel Proust
It has been said that beauty brings a promise of happiness, but it could be otherwise that the possibility of joy is the beginning of beauty. View quote
Marcel Proust
A work in which there are theories is like an object which still has the ticket that shows its price. View quote
Marcel Proust
Often it is just lack of imagination that keeps a man from suffering very much. View quote
Marcel Proust
Our desires cut across one another, and in this confused existence it is rare for happiness to coincide with the desire that clamoured for it. View quote
Marcel Proust
The only thing that does not change is that at any and every time it appears that there have been great changes. View quote
Marcel Proust
I had come in time to learn that it was a mistake to smile a friendly smile when somebody made a fool of me. View quote
Marcel Proust
No doubt very few people understand the purely subjective nature of the phenomenon that we call love, or how it creates, so to speak, a supplementary person, distinct from the person whom the world knows by the same name, a person most of whose constituent elements are derived from ourselves. View quote
Marcel Proust
There's nothing like desire to prevent the things one says from having any resemblance to the things in one's mind. (Marcel Proust)
In reality, in love there is a permanent suffering which joy neutralizes, renders virtual, delays, but which can at any moment become what it would have become long earlier if one had not obtained what one wanted, atrocious. View quote
Marcel Proust
Our memory is like a shop in the window of which is exposed now one, now another photograph of the same person. And as a rule the most recent exhibit remains for some time the only one to be seen. View quote
Marcel Proust
That translucent alabaster of our memories. View quote
Marcel Proust
Life is extraordinarily suave and sweet with certain natural, witty, affectionate people who have unusual distinction and are capable of every vice, but who make a display of none in public and about whom no one can affirm they have a single one. There is something supple and secret about them. Besides, their perversity gives spice to their most innocent occupations, such as taking a walk in the garden at night. View quote
Marcel Proust
Neurosis has an absolute genius for malingering. There is no illness which it cannot counterfeit perfectly. If it is capable of deceiving the doctor, how should it fail to deceive the patient. View quote
Marcel Proust
The opinions which we hold of one another, our relations with friends and kinfolk are in no sense permanent, save in appearance, but are as eternally fluid as the sea itself. View quote
Marcel Proust
There is not a woman in the world the possession of whom is as precious as that of the truths which she reveals to us by causing us to suffer. View quote
Marcel Proust
But when one believes in the reality of things, making them visible by artificial means is not quite the same as feeling that they are close at hand. View quote
Marcel Proust
I was left alone there in the company of the orchids, roses and violets, which, like people waiting beside you who do not know you, preserved a silence which their individuality as living things made all the more striking, and warmed themselves in the heat of a glowing coal fire... View quote
Marcel Proust
But to ask pity of our body is like discoursing in front of an octopus, for which our words can have no more meaning than the sound of the tides, and with which we should be appalled to find ourselves condemned to live. (Marcel Proust)
The human plagiarism which is most difficult to avoid, for individuals... is the plagiarism of ourselves. View quote
Marcel Proust
If, I can someday see M. Claude Monet's garden, I feel sure that I shall see something that is not so much a garden of flowers as of colours and tones, less an oldfashioned flower garden than a colour garden, so to speak, one that achieves an effect not entirely nature's, because it was planted so that only the flowers with matching colours will bloom at the same time, harmonized in an infinite stretch of blue or pink. View quote
Marcel Proust
Less disappointing than life, great works of art do not begin by giving us all their best. View quote
Marcel Proust
People who are not in love fail to understand how an intelligent man can suffer because of a very ordinary woman. This is like being surprised that anyone should be stricken with cholera because of a creature so insignificant as the comma bacillus. View quote
Marcel Proust