1,085 Quotes by Marcel Proust

It was impossible for me to thank my father; what he called my sentimentality would have exasperated him.

People don’t know when they are happy. They’re never so unhappy as they think they are.

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

To have a kind heart is everything.

We see things but we don’t see them, like things that slid through the mind, one flowing into another.

We dream much of a paradise, or rather of a number of successive paradises, but each of them is, long before we die, a paradise lost, in which we should feel ourselves lost too.

Il faudrait choisir de cesser de souffrir ou de cesser d’aimer.

It is our imagination that is responsible for love, not the other person.

If, as would sometimes happen, she had the appearance of some woman whom I had known in waking hours, I would abandon myself altogether to the sole quest of her, like people who set out on a journey to see with their own eyes some city that they have always longed to visit, and imagine that they can taste in reality what has charmed their fancy.