1,085 Quotes by Marcel Proust

... it had arrested for all eternity the moment which it had been trying to make pass more quickly.

The true paradises are the paradises that we have lost.

When we are suffering, the only words that touch us are the words of those who have known the person we loved and who can recall him to us.

The only true paradises are the paradises that we have lost.

And in myself, too, many things have perished which, I imagined, would last for ever, and new structures have arisen, giving birth to new sorrows and new joys which in those days I could not have foreseen, just as now the old are difficult of comprehension.

... he was like a man into whose life a woman, whom he has seen for a moment passing by, has brought a new form of beauty, which strengthens and enlarges his own power of perception, without his knowing even whether he is ever to see her again whom he loves already, although he knows nothing of her, not even her name.

Because happiness alone is good for the body; whereas sorrow develops the strength of the mind.

Ideas come to us as the successors to griefs, and griefs, at the moment when they change into ideas, lose some part of their power to injure the heart; the transformation itself, even, for an instant, releases suddenly a little joy.

As soon as one is unhappy one becomes moral.