1,085 Quotes by Marcel Proust

My grandmother had a love which found in me so totally its complement, its goal, its constant lodestar, that the genius of great men, all the genius that might ever have existed from the beginning of the world, would have been less precious to my grandmother than a single one of my defects.

[A] man of great talent will normally pay less attention to other people’s foolishness than would a fool.

The images selected by memory are as arbitrary, as narrow, as elusive as those which the imagination had formed and reality has destroyed. There is no reason why, existing outside ourselves, a real place should conform to the pictures in our memory rather than those in our dreams. And besides, a fresh reality will perhaps make us forget, detest even, the desires on account of which we set out on our journey.

As profession recognizes profession, so, too, does vice.

it appears that vice is far more common than one has been led to believe.

But for the invert vice begins, not when he establishes a relationship (for too many reasons may govern that), but when he takes his pleasure with women.

Her [Odette's] eyes were beautiful, but so large they seemed to droop beneath their own weight, strained the rest of her face and always made her appear unwell or in a bad mood.

He lives at Balbec?” crooned the Baron in a tone so far from interrogatory that it is regrettable that the written language does not possess a sign other than the question mark to end such apparently unquestioning remarks. It is true that such a sign would be of little use except to M. de Charlus.

Soon, what was tedious was everything. 'Beautiful things, they're so tedious! Paintings, they're enough to drive you mad...How right you are, it's so tedious, writing letters!' In the end it was life itself that she declared to us was a bore, without one quite knowing from where she was taking her term of comparison.