1,085 Quotes by Marcel Proust

It is often hard to bear the tears that we ourselves have caused.

For what we suppose to be our love or our jealousy is never a single, continuous and indivisible passion. It is composed of an infinity of successive loves, of different jealousies, each of which is ephemeral, although by their uninterrupted multiplicity they give us the impression of continuity, the illusion of unity.

The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it....

The only paradise is paradise lost.

A picture's beauty does not depend on the things portrayed in it.

What an abyss of uncertainty, whenever the mind feels overtaken by itself; when it, the seeker, is at the same time the dark region through which it must go seeking and where all its equipment will avail it nothing. Seek? More than that: create. It is face to face with something which does not yet exist, which it alone can make actual, which it alone can bring into the light of day.

The most familiar precepts are not always the truest.

Love is a reciprocal torture.

I was not at all worried about finding my doctor boring; I expected from him, thanks to an art of which the laws escaped me, that he pronounce concerning my health an indisputable oracle by consulting my entrails.