1,085 Quotes by Marcel Proust

For often I have wished to see a person again without realising that it was simply because that personal recalled to me a hedge of hawthorns in blossom, and I have been led to believe, and to make someone else believe, in a renewal of affection, by what was no more than an inclination to travel.

We live not alone but chained to a creature of a different kingdom: our body.

Are not the thoughts of the dying often turned towards the practical, painful, obscure, visceral aspect, towards the "seamy side" of death which is, as it happens, the side that death actually presents to them and forces them to feel, and which far more closely resembles a crushing burden, a difficulty in breathing, a destroying thirst, than the abstract idea to which we are accustomed to give the name of Death?

Desire makes everything blossom

These dreams reminded me that, since I wished some day to become a writer, it was high time to decide what sort of books I was going to write. But as soon as I asked myself the question, and tried to discover some subject to which I could impart a philosophical significance of infinite value, my mind would stop like a clock, my consciousness would be faced with a blank, I would feel either that I was wholly devoid of talent or perhaps that some malady of the brain was hindering its development.

The only true voyage would be not to travel through a hundred different lands, but to see the same land through a hundred different pairs of eyes.

A cathedral, a wave of a storm, a dancer's leap, never turn out to be as high as we had hoped.

It comes so soon, the moment when there is nothing left to wait for.

The stellar universe is not so difficult to understand as the real actions of other people, especially of the people with whom we are in love.