1,085 Quotes by Marcel Proust

Our intonations contain our philosophy of life, what each of us is constantly telling himself about things.

For each illness that doctors cure with medicine, they provoke ten in healthy people by inoculating them with the virus that is a thousand times more powerful than any microbe: the idea that one is ill.

For theories and schools, like microbes and corpuscles, devour one another and by their strife ensure the continuity of life.

A collection of bad love songs, tattered from overuse, has to touch us like a cemetery or a village. So what if the houses have no style, if the graves are vanishing under tasteless ornaments and inscriptions? Before an imagination sympathetic and respectful enough to conceal momentarily its aesthetic disdain, that dust may release a flock of souls, their beaks holding the still verdant dreams that gave them an inkling of the next world and let them rejoice or weep in this world.

Le temps qui change les e" tres ne modifie pas l'image que nous avons garde e d'eux. Although time changes people, it cannot change the image we have already made of them.

Not caring for their lives' is it? Why, what in the world is there that we should care for if it's not our lives, the only gift the Lord never offers us a second time.

In a separation it is the one who is not really in love who says the more tender things.

So long as I know what's boiling in my pot I don't bother my head about what's in other people's.

The heart does not lie.