1,085 Quotes by Marcel Proust

The fixity of a habit is generally in direct proportion to its absurdity.

...but the loss of a memory, like the omission of a phrase during reading, rather than making for uncertainty, can lead to a premature certainty.

Годі й передати, як хвилювали мене ці напливи таємниці та краси до моєї кімнати, яку я зумів наповнити своїм "я" так, що зважав на неї не більше, ніж на самого себе.

Real life, life finally uncovered and clarified, the only life in consequence lived to the full, is literature. Life in this sense dwells within all ordinary people as much as the artist. But they do not see it because they are not trying to shed light on it.

...for each of us sees clarity only in those ideas which have the same degree of confusion as his own.

We get anxious, and it is sometimes long after the hour of danger, which a subsequent distraction has made us forget, that we remember our anxiety.

And so it is with our own past. It is a labour in vain to recapture it: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile. The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) which we do not suspect. And as for that object, it depends on chance whether we come upon it or not before we ourselves must die.

... so in that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann's park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and of its surroundings, taking their proper shapes and growing solid, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea.

But since the facts which I should then have recalled would have been prompted only by an exercise of the will, by my intellectual memory, and since the pictures which that kind of memory shews us of the past preserve nothing of the past itself, I should never have had any wish to ponder over this residue of Combray.