1,085 Quotes by Marcel Proust

When we are in love, our love is too vast to be wholly contained within ourselves; it radiates outwards, reaches the resistant surface of the loved one, which reflects it back to its starting-point; and this return of our own tenderness is what we see as the other's feelings, working their new, enhanced charm on us, because we do not recognize them as having originated in ourselves.

It was true that Odette played vilely, but often the most memorable impression of a piece of music is one that has arisen out of a jumble of wrong notes struck by unskilful fingers upon a tuneless piano.

I had spent the New Year's Day of old men, who differ on that day from their juniors, not because people have ceased to give them presents but because they themselves have ceased to believe in the New Year.

A general is like a writer who wants to write a play, or a book, but whom the book itself, with the unexpected options that it reveals at one point, the impasse it presents at another, causes to deviate extensively from his preconceived plan.

... that form of the instinct of self-preservation with which we guard everything that is best in ourselves...

...Swann had, as he shook the Marquise's hand, seen her bosom from close to and from above, he plunged an attentive, serious, absorbed, almost anxious, gaze into the depths of her corsage, and his nostrils, intoxicated by the woman's perfume, quivered like a butterfly ready to go and settle on the half-glimpsed flower.

The whole art of living is to use the people who make us suffer simply as steps enabling us to obtain access to their divine form and thus joyfully to people our lives with divinities.

I never allow myself to be influenced in the smallest degree either by atmospheric disturbances or by the arbitrary divisions of what is known as Time. I would willingly reintroduce to society the opium pipe of China or the Malayan kriss, but I am wholly and entirely without instruction in those infinitely more per-nicious (besides being quite bleakly bourgeois) implements, the umbrella and the watch.

Non subisco mai l'autorità delle perturbazioni atmosferiche né delle divisioni convenzionali del tempo. Sarei lieto di riabilitare l'uso della pipa d'oppio e del kriss malese, ma ignoro quello di quegli strumenti infinitamente più perniciosi e d'altronde piattamente borghesi, l'orologio e l'ombrello.