1,085 Quotes by Marcel Proust

My mother had to abandon her quest, but managed to extract from the restriction itself a further delicate thought, like good poets whom the tyranny of rhyme forces into the discovery of their finest lines.

Discovery consists not in seeking new lands, but in seeing with new eyes.

Le style, pour l’e crivain aussi bien que pour le peintre, est une question non de technique mais de vision. For the writer as well as for the painter, style is not a question of technique, but of vision.

Were it not for habit, life would seem delightful to beings constantly under threat of dying, in other words to all humankind.

Facts do not find their way into the world in which our beliefs reside – they did not produce our beliefs, there, they do not destroy them.

Since we possess its hymn, engraved on our hearts in its entirety, there is no need of any woman to repeat the opening lines, potent with the admiration which her beauty inspires, for us to remember all that follows.

A fashionable milieu is one in which everybody’s opinion is made up of the opinion of all the others. Has everybody a different opinion? Then it is a literary milieu.

What we feel is the only thing that exists for us, and we project it into the past, into the future, without letting ourselves be stopped by the fictitious barriers of death.

L’ide e qu’on mourra est plus cruelle que mourir, mais moins que l’ide e qu’un autre est mort. The idea of dying is worse than dying itself, but less cruel than the idea that another has died.