1,085 Quotes by Marcel Proust

How else learn the real, if not by inventing what might lie outside it?

This love of ours, in so far as it is a love for one particular creature, is not perhaps a very real thing, since, though associations of pleasant or painful musings can attach it for a time to a woman to the extent of making us believe that it has been inspired by her in a logically necessary way, if on the other hand we detach ourselves deliberately or unconsciously from those associations, this love, as though it were in fact spontaneous and sprang from ourselves alone, will revive in order to bestow itself on another woman.

Nobility is often no more than the inner aspect which our egotistical feelings assume when we have not yet named and classified them.

A language which we do not know is a fortress sealed.

And yet one did not find in the speech of Bergotte a certain luminosity which in his books, as in those of some other writers, often modified in the written phrase the appearance of its words. This was doubtless because that light issues from so profound a depth that its rays do not penetrate to our spoken words in the hours in which, thrown open to others by the act of conversation, we are to a certain extent closed against ourselves.

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

We don’t receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.

How often is not the prospect of future happiness thus sacrificed to one’s impatient insistence upon an immediate gratification, But his desire to know the truth was stronger, and seemed to him nobler than his desire for her.

When you work to please others you can’t succeed, but the things you do to satisfy yourself stand a chance of catching someone’s interest.