Quotes by Marcel Proust
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But for the invert vice begins, not when he establishes a relationship (for too many reasons may govern that), but when he takes his pleasure with women.

Unkind people imagine themselves to be inflicting pain on someone equally unkind.

The opinions which we hold of one another, our relations with friends and kinsfolk are in no sense permanent, save in appearance, but are as eternally fluid as the sea itself.

One says the things which one feels the need to say, and which the other will not understand: one speaks for oneself alone.

When you come to live with a woman, you will soon cease to see anything of what made you love her; though it is true that the two sundered elements can be reunited by jealousy.

We may have revolved every possible idea in our minds, and yet the truth has never occurred to us, and it is from without, when we are least expecting it, that it gives us its cruel stab and wounds us forever.

For theories and schools, like microbes and corpuscles, devour one another and by their strife ensure the continuity of life.

I drank a second mouthful in which I find nothing more than in the first, then a third which gives me rather less than the second. It is time to stop; the potion is losing its magic.

The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it.

For neither our greatest fears nor our greatest hopes are beyond the limits of our strength -- we are able in the end both to dominate the first and to achieve the second.

That translucent alabaster of our memories.

My dear Madame, I just noticed that I forgot my cane at your house yesterday; please be good enough to give it to the bearer of this letter. P.S. Kindly pardon me for disturbing you; I just found my cane.

We have such numerous interests in our lives that it is not uncommon, on a single occasion, for the foundations of a happiness that does not yet exist to be laid down alongside the intensification of a grief from which we are still suffering.

We do not include the pleasures we enjoy in sleep in the inventory of the pleasures we have experienced in the course of our existence.

For the possession of what we love is an even greater joy than love itself.

We only really know what is new, what suddenly introduces to our sensibility a change of tone which strikes us, that for which habit has not yet substituted its pale fac-similes.

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.

I spent many a charming evening talking and playing with Albertine, but none so sweet as when I was watching her sleep.

I had long since given up trying to extract from a woman as it were the square root of her unknown quantity, the mystery of which a mere introduction was generally enough to dispel.

Monsieur Beulier never engaged in thought except to speak the truth, and never spoke except to express his thought.

Love is an incurable malady like those pathetic states in which rheumatism affords the sufferer a brief respite only to be replaced by epileptiform headaches.

I would feel the satisfaction of being shut in from the outer world.

For a long time I used to go to bed early. Sometimes, my eyes would close so quickly that I had not even time to say I'm going to sleep. And half an hour later the thought that it was time to go to sleep would awaken me.

Because happiness alone is good for the body; whereas sorrow develops the strength of the mind.

And so when studying faces, we do indeed measure them, but as painters, not as surveyors.

Dear Friend: I have nearly died three times since morning.

To write that essential book, a great writer does not need to invent it but merely to translate it, since it already exists in each one of us. The duty and task of a writer are those of translator.

Conversation, which is friendship's mode of expression, is a superficial digression which gives us nothing worth acquiring. We may talk for a lifetime without doing more than indefinitely repeat the vacuity of a minute.

Less disappointing than life, great works of art do not begin by giving us all their best.

We live not alone but chained to a creature of a different kingdom: our body.

Our worst fears, like our greatest hopes, are not outside our powers, and we can come in the end to triumph over the former and to achieve the latter.

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 common bacillus.

Her Albertine's intense and velvety gaze fastened itself, glued itself to the passer-by, so adhesive, so corrosive, that you felt that, in withdrawing, it must tear away the skin.

I felt that I was not penetrating to the full depth of my impression, that something more lay behind that mobility, that luminosity, something which they seemed at once to contain and to conceal.

Hard people are weak people whom nobody wants, and the strong, caring little whether they are wanted or not, have alone that meekness which the common herd mistake for weakness.

Instead of seeking new landscapes, develop new eyes.

Not caring for their lives' is it? Why, what in the world is there that we should care for if it's not our lives, the only gift the Lord never offers us a second time.

Like a kaleidoscope which is every now and then given a turn, society arranges successively in different orders elements which one would have supposed immutable, and composes a new pattern.

No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me.

Homosexuals would be the best husbands in the world if they did not put on an act of loving other women.

The real stars of society are tired of appearing there. He who is curious to gaze at them must often migrate to another hemisphere, where they are more or less alone.

As profession recognizes profession, so, too, does vice.

There's nothing like desire to prevent the things one says from having any resemblance to the things in one's mind.

Princes know themselves to be princes, and are not snobs; besides, they believe themselves to be so far above everything that is not of their blood royal that noblemen and commoners appear, in the depths beneath them, to be practically on a level.

But certain favourite roles are played by us so often before the public and rehearsed so carefully when we are alone that we find it easier to refer to their fictitious testimony than to that of a reality which we have almost entirely forgotten.

One must never miss an opportunity of quoting things by others which are always more interesting than those one thinks up oneself.

Our passions shape our books, repose writes them in the intervals.

Medicine being a compendium of the successive and contradictory mistakes of medical practitioners, when we summon the wisest of them to our aid, the chances are that we may be relying on a scientific truth the error of which will be recognized in a few years time.

That form of the instinct of self-preservation with which we guard everything that is best in ourselves.

Physical love, so unjustly decried, forces everyone to manifest even the smallest bits of kindness he possesses, of selflessness,that they shine in the eyes of all who surround him.

Even from the simplest, the most realistic point of view, the countries which we long for occupy, at any given moment, a far larger place in our actual life than the country in which we happen to be.

When we have passed a certain age, the soul of the child we were and the souls of the dead from whom we have sprung come to lavish on us their riches and their spells.

Then came the deglutition of saliva, and the old lady instinctively wiped the stubble of her toothbrush moustache with her handkerchief.

Certainly, it is more reasonable to devote one's life to women than to postage stamps or old snuff-boxes, even to pictures or statues. But the example of other collections should be a warning to us to diversify, to have not one woman only but several.

The inertia of the mind urges it to slide down the easy slope of imagination, rather than to climb the steep slope of introspection.

At the heart of our friendly or purely social relations, there lurks a hostility momentarily cured but recurring by fits and starts.

Whose inferiority proclaimed her own supremacy so loud.

With women who do not love us, as with the dear departed, the knowledge that there is no hope left does not prevent us from continuing to wait.

Love...., ever unsatisfied, lives always in the moment that is about to come.

But one never finds a cathedral, a wave in a storm, a dancer's leap in the air quite as high as one has been expecting;.

For a young man has strong imagination but poor judgment, so that he imagines others to be as big as he is but considers himself to be very small. He has unbounded trust in the universe but is constantly unsure of himself.

Most of our faculties lie dormant because they can rely upon Habit, which knows what there is to be done and has no need of their services.

The true voyage of discovery is not a journey to a new place; it is learning to see with new eyes.

And then, gradually, the memory of her would fade away, I had forgotten the girl of my dream.

Even though our lives wander, our memories remain in one place.

Altogether, I had derived little benefit from being in Balbec, for which reason I was all the more determined to come back one day. I felt I had spent too short a time there.

There was nothing abnormal about it when homosexuality was the norm.

No doubt, having developed the habit, out of idleness, of each day putting off my work until the day after, I thought that death could be dealt with in the same way.

The artist who gives up an hour of work for an hour of conversation with a friend knows that he is sacrificing a reality for something that does not exist.

The only possible paradises are those we have lost.

All the mind's activity is easy if it is not subjected to reality.

Now are the woods all black, But still the sky is blue.

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.

The moments of the past do not remain still; they retain in our memory the motion which drew them towards the future, towards a future which has itself become the past, and draw us on in their train.

She was not yet dead. But I was already alone.

In short, my aunt demanded that whoever came to see her must at one and the same time approve of her way of life, commiserate with her in her sufferings, and assure her of ultimate recovery.

M. de Charlus made no reply and looked as if he had not heard, which was one of his favourite forms of rudeness.

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

So few are the easy victories as the ultimate failures.