1,085 Quotes by Marcel Proust

The truth is that men can have several sorts of pleasure. The true pleasure is the one for which they abandon the other.

A woman one loves rarely suffices for all our needs, so we deceive her with another whom we do not love.

If, I can someday see M. Claude Monet's garden, I feel sure that I shall see something that is not so much a garden of flowers as of colours and tones, less an old-fashioned flower garden than a colour garden, so to speak, one that achieves an effect not entirely nature's, because it was planted so that only the flowers with matching colours will bloom at the same time, harmonized in an infinite stretch of blue or pink.

In the sort of screen dappled with different states of mind which my consciousness would simultaneously unfold while I read, and which ranged from the aspirations hidden deepest within me to the completely exterior vision of the horizon which I had, at the bottom of the garden, before my eyes, what was first in me, innermost, the constantly moving handle that controlled the rest, was my belief in the philosophical richness and beauty of the book I was reading, and my desire to appropriate them for myself, whatever that book might be.

To the pure all things are pure!

I had come in time to learn that it was a mistake to smile a friendly smile when somebody made a fool of me.

Happiness serves hardly any other purpose than to make unhappiness possible.

We are healed from suffering only by experiencing it to the full.

We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world.