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Marcel Proust Quotes

Total quotes: 26
“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”
— Marcel Proust, Swann's Way: In Search of Lost Time, Vol. 1 (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)
Tagged: New Eyes, Eyes, Seeing The World New, 107 Of The Greatest Single Sentences In Literature, Perfect Sentences
“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, Remembrance of Things Past, Vol. 1 (Wordsworth Classics of World Literature)
Tagged: Dreaming, dangerous, danger
“Always try to keep a patch of sky above your life.”
— Marcel Proust, Swann's Way
Tagged: place to breathe, Freedom, Creativity, Expressing Yourself, Living, Life
“All our final decisions are made in a state of mind that is not going to last.”
— Marcel Proust, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower
Tagged: decision, State of Mind, Choices
“Only through art can we emerge from ourselves and know what another person sees.”
— Marcel Proust, Time Regained
Tagged: Art, seeing, Vision, appreciating
“I had been mistaken in thinking that I could see clearly into my own heart.”
— Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past: Volume 3: 3/3(Penguin Clothbound Classics) by Marcel Proust (2016-11-24)
Tagged: Deep Thoughts, Perception
“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, Swann's Way: In Search of Lost Time, Vol. 1
Tagged: Love, Falling In Love, Possesions, Heart of a Woman
“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.”
— Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time
Tagged: inspiration, Advice, Wisdom, Hope
“I felt on seeing her that desire to live which is reborn in us whenever we become conscious anew of beauty and of happiness.”
— Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Volume II: Within a Budding Grove
Tagged: Love, Aesthetics, Love as Rebirth, Beauty As Rebirth
“Love is not vain because it is frustrated, but because it is fulfilled. The people we love turn to ashes when we possess them.”
— Marcel Proust, Rememberance of Things Past Volumes I & II ( Set )
Tagged: Love, Vain, dangerous
“Gaze delightedly at a belt of liquid azure without knowing whether it belongs to the sea or sky.”
— Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Volume II: Within a Budding Grove
Tagged: Azure, Actions towards, Action Towards Reinvigoration, Soothing Language
“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”
— Marcel Proust, Swann's Way: In Search of Lost Time, Vol. 1 (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)
“Let us be grateful to people who make us happy, they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.”
— Marcel Proust
Tagged: Friendship
“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.”
— Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove
Tagged: Love, Understanding Love
“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...”
— Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove
Tagged: Alone, Lonely, Silence, Individuality
“You're too sweet, I can't tell you how sweet I think you are.”
— Marcel Proust, Selected letters, Volume 1
Tagged: Love, Sweetness, Kind, Goodness, Relationships, love & relationship, Personality
“A little tap at the window, as though some missile had struck it, followed by a plentiful, falling sound, as light, though, as if a shower of sand were being sprinkled from a window overhead; then the fall spread, took on an order, a rhythm, became liquid, loud, drumming, musical, innumerable, universal. It was the rain.”
— Marcel Proust, Swann's Way
Tagged: Rain, Music, rhythm
“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, Remembrance of Things Past
Tagged: Fragrance, Memories, Nostalgia, Smell
“For a long time I would go to bed early.”
— Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Volume I: Swann's Way
Tagged: first lines of books
“Life would have seemed an exquisite thing to me if only I had been free to spend it, hour after hour, with her, to go with her to the stream, to the cow, to the train, to be always at her side, to feel that I was known to her, had my place in her thoughts.”
— Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Volume II: Within a Budding Grove
Tagged: Pastoral, Love, Sublime Beauty
“Love is a striking example of how little reality means to us.”
— Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time [volumes 1 to 7] (Centaur Classics) [The 100 greatest novels of all time - #13]
Tagged: Love, Reality, Relationships, Dating
“Pleasure in this respect is like photography. What we take, in the presence of the beloved object, is merely a negative, which we develop later, when we are back at home, and have once again found at our disposal that inner dark-room the entrance to which is barred to us so long as we are with other people.”
— Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Volume II: Within a Budding Grove
Tagged: Memory, Photography
“The places we have known do not belong solely to the world of space in which we situate them for our greater convenience. They were only a thin slice among contiguous impressions which formed our life at that time; the memory of a certain image is but regret for a certain moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fleeting, alas, as the years.”
— Marcel Proust, Swann's Way: In Search of Lost Time, Vol. 1
Tagged: Places, World, convenience, Life, Memory
“The only true voyage of discovery, the only fountain of Eternal Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to behold the hundred universes that each of them beholds, that each of them is; and this we can contrive with an Elstir, with a Vinteuil; with men like these we do really fly from star to star.”
— Marcel Proust, The Prisoner: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 5(Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)
Tagged: Actual Quote, Discovery, Explore
“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 Search of Lost Time
Tagged: Memory, bond, Illusion, Love, Friendship, Man, Escape, Existence
“We believe that we can change the things around us in accordance with our desires—we believe it because otherwise we can see no favourable outcome. We do not think of the outcome which generally comes to pass and is also favourable: we do not succeed in changing things in accordance with our desires, but gradually our desires change. The situation that we hoped to change because it was intolerable becomes unimportant to us. We have failed to surmount the obstacle, as we were absolutely determined to do, but life has taken us round it, led us beyond it, and then if we turn round to gaze into the distance of the past, we can barely see it, so imperceptible has it become.”
— Marcel Proust, Swann's Way: In Search of Lost Time, Vol. 1 (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)
Tagged: lost, found, Fail, Believe
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