A child who has been breathing since birth without ever noticing it does not know how essential the unheeded air that gently swells his chest is to his life. Does he happen to be suffocating in a convulsion, a bout of fever? Desperately straining his entire being, he struggles almost for his life, for his lost tranquillity, which he will regain only with the air from which he did not realize his tranquillity was inseparable.

— Marcel Proust

Marcel Proust Quotes

Vinteuil had been dead for many years; but in the sound of these instruments which he had animated, it had been given him to prolong, for an unlimited time, a part at least of his life.

— Marcel Proust

Thanks to the gods! My misfortune exceeds my hopes.41.

— Marcel Proust

And then one goes on to the next. Because love is all rot, you know.

— Marcel Proust

The reality that must be expressed resides, I now realised, not in the appearance of the subject but in the degree of penetration of that intuition to a depth where that appearance matters little, as symbolised by the sound of the spoon upon the plate, the stiffness of the table-napkin, which were more precious for my spiritual renewal than many humanitarian, patriotic, international conversations. More style, I had heard said in those days, more literature of life.

— Marcel Proust

Photography acquires a certain dignity, which it does not normally have, when it is not just a reproduction of reality but can show us things that no longer exist.

— Marcel Proust

Physical pain had imposed a regimen... Illness is the best heeded of doctors: to kindness or to knowledge, we only make promises; suffering we obey.

— Marcel Proust

For, medicine being a compendium of the successive and contradictory mistakes of doctors, even when we call in the best of them the chances are that we may be staking our hopes on some medical theory that will be proved false in a few years. So that to believe in medicine would be utter madness, were it not still a greater madness not to believe in it, for from this accumulation of errors a few valid theories have emerged in the long run.

— Marcel Proust

In point of fact, we always discover after the event that our adversaries had a reason for taking the side they do take, and one that does not depend on the degree to which that side is in the right, and that those who think as we do have been constrained to do so by, if their moral nature is too contemptible to be invoked, intelligence, and if they have no great acumen, uprightness.

— Marcel Proust

And for another thing, though the imagination is easily teased by the desire for something we cannot possess, its wings are never clipped as they would be by a closer glimpse of reality, in these encounters where the charm of the passing beauty is generally in direct relation to their brevity.

— Marcel Proust

The links between another person and ourselves exist only in our minds. Memory weakens them as it fades, and despite the illusions which we hope will deceive us and with which, whether from love, friendship, politeness, human respect or from duty, we hope to deceive others, we exist on our own. Man is a being who cannot move beyond his own boundaries, who knows others only within himself, and if he alleges the contrary, he is lying.

— Marcel Proust

We believe that we may change things around us to suit our desires, we believe this because otherwise we can see no acceptable solution. We do not think of the solution which occurs most frequently and which is also acceptable: when we do not manage to change things to suit our desires, but our desires gradually change. We become indifferent to a situation which we had hoped to change when we found it unbearable.

— Marcel Proust

It is not enough in love, as in everyday life, to fear only the future: one must fear the past, which often becomes real to us only after the future, and I am not simply speaking of the past about which we learn only after the event, but of the one we have carried within us for many years, and which we only now learn to read.

— Marcel Proust

It is strange how a first love, by the lesions it leaves on our heart, may open the way for later loves, but yet fail to offer us, in the identical character of our symptoms and sufferings, the means of curing them.

— Marcel Proust

What attaches us to other human beings is the thousand tiny roots, the innumerable threads formed by memories of the previous evening, hopes for the following morning; it is this continuous web of habit from which we cannot extricate ourselves.

— Marcel Proust

I have told dreadful, invented stories about myself to so many people, simply so that my ‘conquests’ should seem immoral to them, and make them all the more furious. One ought, of course, to do the opposite: show, without ostentation, that one has good feelings, rather than hiding them so carefully. And it would be easy if one knew how never to hate, always to love. Then, one would be so happy only ever to say the things that make other people happy, make them warm to one, love one!

— Marcel Proust

Two traits of Albertine’s character came back to me at that moment, one to comfort and the other to appall me, for we can find everything in our memory: it is a kind of pharmacy or chemical laboratory, where one’s hand may fall at any moment on a sedative drug or a dangerous poison.

— Marcel Proust

Jealousy is often only an anxious need to be tyrannical applied to matters of love.

— Marcel Proust

L’amour, c’est l’espace et le temps rendus sensibles au coeur.

— Marcel Proust

But we would emerge from our shelter, for the rain was playing a game, now, among the branches, and, even when it was almost dry again underfoot, a stray drop or two, lingering in the hollow of a leaf, would run down and hang glistening from the point of it until suddenly it splashed plump upon our upturned faces from the whole height of the tree.

— Marcel Proust

The paradoxes of today are the prejudices of tomorrow.

— Marcel Proust
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