1,085 Quotes by Marcel Proust

Like a swimmer who throws himself into the water in order to learn, but chooses a moment when there are not too many people to see him.

Happiness is salutary for the body but sorrow develops the powers of the spirit.

But the chain of circumstances linked up, imprisoning her, the victim of an illness that has no remedy because it has no reason.

And in the same way, again, are not the thoughts of men and women in the agony of death often turned towards the practical, painful, obscure, internal, intestinal aspect, towards that ‘seamy side’ of death which is, as it happens, the side that death actually presents to them and forces them to feel, a side which far more closely resembles a crushing burden, a difficulty in breathing, a destroying thirst, than the abstract idea to which we are accustomed to give the name of Death?

Les vrais paradis sont les paradis qu’on a perdus.

We believe we can change things according to our wishes because that’s the only happy solution we can see. We don’t think of what usually happens and what is also a happy solution; things don’t change, but by and by our wishes change.

I do find it absurd that a man of his intelligence should suffer over a person of that sort, who isn’t even interesting – because they say she’s an idiot,” she added with the wisdom of people not in love who believe a man of sense should be unhappy only over a person who is worth it; which is rather like being surprised that anyone should condescend to suffer from cholera because of so small a creature as the comma bacillus.

There are optical errors in time as there are in space.

For Swann was finding in things once more, since he had fallen in love, the charm that he had found when, in his adolescence, he had fancied himself an artist; with this difference, that what charm lay in them now was conferred by Odette alone.