|
7282165
|
Always try to keep a patch of sky above your life.
|
|
|
Marcel Proust |
|
1556d36
|
Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself. The writer's work is only a kind of optical instrument he provides the reader so he can discern what he might never have seen in himself without this book. The reader's recognition in himself of what the book says is the proof of the book's truth.
|
|
|
Marcel Proust |
|
433c51f
|
Let us leave pretty women to men with no imagination.
|
|
women
imagination
proust
|
Marcel Proust |
|
784ac35
|
Love is a striking example of how little reality means to us.
|
|
|
Marcel Proust |
|
734bf07
|
We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.
|
|
wisdom
inspirational
|
Marcel Proust |
|
fc6bbda
|
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 |
|
1e90629
|
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
|
|
travel
immortality
life
|
Marcel Proust |
|
a8ded2a
|
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 favorite book.
|
|
words
literature
reading
|
Marcel Proust |
|
e0589e4
|
Love is not vain because it is frustrated, but because it is fulfilled. The people we love turn to ashes when we posess them.
|
|
|
Marcel Proust |
|
f0f5381
|
The thirst for something other than what we have...to bring something new, even if it is worse, some emotion, some sorrow; when our sensibility, which happiness has silenced like an idle harp, wants to resonate under some hand, even a rough one, and even if it might be broken by it.
|
|
|
Marcel Proust |
|
965833f
|
Now are the woods all black, But still the sky is blue.
|
|
|
Marcel Proust |
|
4acad15
|
There is no one, no matter how wise he is, who has not in his youth said
|
|
|
Marcel Proust |
|
b10119c
|
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 |
|
5c19d04
|
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 |
|
bc20ad8
|
But sometimes illumination comes to our rescue at the very moment when all seems lost; we have knocked at every door and they open on nothing until, at last, we stumble unconsciously against the only one through which we can enter the kingdom we have sought in vain a hundred years - and it opens.
|
|
|
Marcel Proust |
|
084fc17
|
If we are to make reality endurable, we must all nourish a fantasy or two.
|
|
|
Marcel Proust |
|
0143955
|
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 |
|
a61f582
|
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 |
|
9df493b
|
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 |
|
433af1e
|
One cannot change, that is to say become a different person, while continuing to acquiesce to the feelings of the person one has ceased to be.
|
|
|
Marcel Proust |
|
0a2ac23
|
the memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment..
|
|
|
Marcel Proust |
|
0784053
|
All our final decisions are made in a state of mind that is not going to last.
|
|
|
Marcel Proust |
|
92ceb6a
|
There is no man...however wise, who has not at some period in his youth said things, or lived a life, the memory of which is so unpleasant to him that he would gladly expunge it. And yet he ought not entirely to regret it, because he cannot be certain that he has indeed become a wise man...
|
|
youth
|
Marcel Proust |
|
4866b63
|
I think that life would suddenly seem wonderful to us if we were threatened to die as you say. Just think of how many projects, travels, love affairs, studies, it-our life-hides from us, made invisible by our laziness which, certain of a future, delays them incessantly.
|
|
death
life
inspirational
|
Marcel Proust |
|
ecfb108
|
I wished to see storms only on those coasts where they raged with most violence...
|
|
proust
|
Marcel Proust |
|
69548fa
|
Even in the most insignificant details of our daily life, none of us can be said to constitute a material whole, which is identical for everyone, and need only be turned up like a page in an account-book or the record of a will; our social personality is created by the thoughts of other people.
|
|
|
Marcel Proust |
|
5b83e01
|
Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.
|
|
writing
self-awareness
self-recognition
readers
writers
|
Marcel Proust |
|
30d98ba
|
We are all of us obliged, if we are to make reality endurable, to nurse a few little follies in ourselves.
|
|
|
Marcel Proust |
|
caad961
|
Perhaps it is not-being that is the true state, and all our dream of life is inexistent; but, if so, we feel that these phrases of music, these conceptions which exist in relation to our dream, must be nothing either. We shall perish, but we have as hostages these divine captives who will follow and share our fate. And death in their company is somehow less bitter, less inglorious, perhaps even less probable.
|
|
|
Marcel Proust |
|
1468321
|
Many years have passed since that night. The wall of the staircase up which I had watched the light of his candle gradually climb was long ago demolished. And in myself, too, many things have perished which I imagined would last for ever, and new ones have arisen, giving birth to new sorrows and new joys which in those days I could not have foreseen, just as now the old are hard to understand.
|
|
time
memory
|
Marcel Proust |
|
331e8d8
|
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.
|
|
|
Marcel Proust |
|
135f540
|
Nine tenths of the ills from which intelligent people suffer spring from their intellect.
|
|
|
Marcel Proust |
|
6287062
|
The bonds that unite us to another human being are sanctified when he or she adopts the same point of view as ourselves in judging one of our imperfections.
|
|
|
Marcel Proust |
|
bf0703e
|
But genius, and even great talent, springs less from seeds of intellect and social refinement superior to those of other people than from the faculty of transforming and transposing them. To heat a liquid with an electric lamp requires not the strongest lamp possible, but one of which the current can cease to illuminate, can be diverted so as to give heat instead of light. To mount the skies it is not necessary to have the most powerful of ..
|
|
time
seed
social
proust
genius
talent
intellect
|
Marcel Proust |
|
fb6a85d
|
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 ..
|
|
|
Marcel Proust |
|
070d469
|
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.
|
|
|
Marcel Proust |
|
b98cfd4
|
Then from those profound slumbers we awake in a dawn, not knowing who we are, being nobody, newly born, ready for anything, the brain emptied of that past which was life until then. And perhaps it is more wonderful still when our landing at the waking-point is abrupt and the thoughts of our sleep, hidden by a cloak of oblivion, have no time to return to us gradually, before sleep ceases. Then, from the black storm through which we seem to h..
|
|
renewal
self
void
|
Marcel Proust |
|
20ae0ed
|
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 |
|
60846c4
|
These dreams reminded me that, since I wished some day to become a writer, it was high time to decide what sort of books I was going to write. But as soon as I asked myself the question, and tried to discover some subject to which I could impart a philosophical significance of infinite value, my mind would stop like a clock, my consciousness would be faced with a blank, I would feel either that I was wholly devoid of talent or perhaps that ..
|
|
|
Marcel Proust |
|
b9f47c2
|
I cannot express the uneasiness caused in me by this intrusion of mystery and beauty into a room I had at last filled with myself to the point of paying no more attention to the room than to that self. The anesthetizing influence of habit having ceased, I would begin to have thoughts, and feelings, and they are such sad things.
|
|
rooms
proust
|
Marcel Proust |
|
79f6bb2
|
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 |
|
17fb947
|
And then, gradually, the memory of her would fade away, I had forgotten the girl of my dream.
|
|
girl
memory
|
Marcel Proust |
|
869fdf1
|
There are few who are worthy to understand what I feel. [...] I seek out those who are of this chosen few, and I avoid the rest.
|
|
|
Marcel Proust |
|
09d4425
|
Even the simple act which we describe as 'seeing someone we know' is, to some extent, an intellectual process. We pack the physical outline of the creature we see with all the ideas we already formed about him, and in the complete picture of him which we compose in our minds those ideas have certainly the principal place. In the end they come to fill out so completely the curve of his cheeks, to follow so exactly the line of his nose, they ..
|
|
|
Marcel Proust |