1,085 Quotes by Marcel Proust

La possession de ce qu’on aime est une joie plus grande encore que l’amour. Possessing what one loves is an even greater joy than love itself.

For everyone who, having no artistic sense-that is to say, no submission to subjective reality-may have the knack of reasoning about art till doomsday, especially if he be, in addition, a diplomat or financier in contact with the ‘realities’ of the present day, is only too ready to believe literature is an intellectual game which is destined to gradually be abandoned as time goes on.

It was like every attitude or action which reveals a man’s deep and hidden character; they bear no relation to what he has previously said, and we cannot confirm our suspicions by the culprit’s evidence, for he will admit nothing; we are reduced to the evidence of our own senses, and we ask ourselves, in the face of this detached and incoherent fragment of recollection, whether indeed our senses have not been the victims of a hallucination...

Knowing a thing does not always mean preventing a thing, but at least the things we know, we hold, if not in our hands, at least in our minds where we can arrange them as we like, which gives us the illusion of a sort of power over them.

A picture’s beauty does not depend on the things portrayed in it.

We ought at least, from prudence, never to speak of ourselves, because that is a subject on which we may be sure that other people’s views are never in accordance with our own.

How much farther does anguish penetrate in psychology than psychology itself!

One reads the papers as one wants to with a bandage over one’s eyes without trying to understand the facts, listening to the soothing words of the editor as to the words of one s mistress.

But so far as the pleasure was concerned, I was naturally not conscious of it until some time later, when, back at the hotel, and in my room alone, I had become myself again. 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.