1,085 Quotes by Marcel Proust

...As for all the little people who call themselves Marquis de Cambremerde or de Gotoblazes, there is no difference between them and the humblest rookie in your regiment. Whether you go and do wee-wee at the Countess Cack's or cack at the Baroness Wee-wee's, it's exactly the same, you will have compromised your reputation and have used a shitty rag instead of toilet paper. Which is unsavoury.

The interval of space separating her from him was one which he must as inevitably traverse as he must descend, by an irresistible gravitation, the steep slope of life itself.

... whose inferiority proclaimed her own supremacy so loud...

The particulars of life do not matter to the artist; they merely provide him with the opportunity to lay bare his genius.

Now are the woods all black, but still the sky is blue. May you always see a blue sky overhead, my young friend; and then, even when the time comes, which is coming now for me, when the woods are all black, when night is fast falling, you will be able to console yourself, as I am doing, by looking up to the sky.

… it would even be inexact to say that I thought of those who read it as readers of my book. Because they were not, as I saw it, my readers. More exactly they were readers of themselves, my book being a sort of magnifying glass … by which I could give them the means to read within themselves.

The belief that a person has a share in an unknown life to which his or her love may win us admission is, of all the prerequisites of love, the one which it values most highly and which makes it set little store by all the rest.

I veri paradisi sono i paradisi che abbiamo perduto.

When you come to live with a woman, you will soon cease to see anything of what made you love; though it is true that the two sundered elements can be reunited by jealousy.