Quotes by "Marcel Proust"

Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.

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

It is grief that develops the powers of the mind.

Until I saw Chardin's painting, I never realized how much beauty lay around me in my parents' house, in the half-cleared table, in the corner of a tablecloth left awry, in the knife beside the empty oyster shell.

There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we believe we left without having lived them: those we spent with a favourite book.

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

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

People wish to learn to swim and at the same time to keep one foot on the ground.

People can have many different kinds of pleasure. The real one is that for which they will forsake the others.

Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions, and composed our masterpieces. Never will the world know all it owes to them, nor all they have suffered to enrich us.

Let us leave pretty women to men without imagination.

There can be no peace of mind in love, since the advantage one has secured is never anything by a fresh starting-point for further desires.

There can be no peace of mind in love, since the advantage one has secured is never anything but a fresh starting-point for further desires.

That which we remember of our conduct is ignored by our closest neighbour; but that which we have forgotten having said, or even what we never said, will cause laughter even into the next world.

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.

Love is a striking example of how little reality means to us.

Now there is one thing I can tell you: you will enjoy certain pleasures you would not fathom now. When you still had your mother you often thought of the days when you would have her no longer. Now you will often think of days past when you had her. When you are used to this horrible thing that they will forever be cast into the past, then you will gently feel her revive, returning to take her place, her entire place, beside you. At the present time, this is not yet possible. Let yourself be inert, wait till the incomprehensible power ... that has broken you restores you a little, I say a little, for henceforth you will always keep something broken about you. Tell yourself this, too, for it is a kind of pleasure to know that you will never love less, that you will never be consoled, that you will constantly remember more and more.

My destination is no longer a place, rather a new way of seeing.

People do not die for us immediately, but remain bathed in a sort of aura of life which bears no relation to true immortality but through which they continue to occupy our thoughts in the same way as when they were alive. It is as though they were traveling abroad.