1,085 Quotes by Marcel Proust

After a certain age, and even if we develop in quite different ways, the more we become ourselves, the more our family traits are accentuated.

It is always thus, impelled by a state of mind which is destined not to last, we make our irrevocable decisions

She's got feet like boats, whiskers like an American, and her undies are filthy.

The fault I find with our journalism is that it forces us to take an interest in some fresh triviality or other every day, whereas only three or four books in a lifetime give us anything that is of real importance.

She's on the stairs, ma'am, getting her breath,' said the young servant, who had not been long up from the country, where my mother had the excellent habit of getting all her servants. Often she had seen them born. That's the only way to get really good ones. And they're the rarest of luxuries.

For instinct dictates our duty and the intellect supplies us with pretexts for evading it.

Nine tenths of the ills from which intelligent people suffer spring from their intellect. They need at least a doctor who understands the disease. How can you expect Cottard to be able to treat you? He has made allowances for the difficulty of digesting sauces, for gastric trouble, but he has made no allowance for the effect of reading Shakespeare.

I never allow myself to be influenced either by atmospheric perturbations or by the conventional divisions of time. I would happily instate the use of the opium pipe and the Malay kris, but I know nothing about the use of those infinitely more pernicious and also insipidly bourgeois implements, the watch and the umbrella.

The facts of life do not penetrate to the sphere in which our beliefs are cherished; as it was not they that engendered those beliefs, so they are powerless to destroy them; they can aim at them continual blows of contradiction and disproof without weakening them;