Quotes from Marcel Proust

The only paradise is paradise lost.

The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.

The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.

We are healed from suffering only by experiencing it to the full.

A man of letters, merely by reading a phrase, can estimate exactly the literary merit of its author.

Man is the creature that cannot emerge from himself, that knows his fellows only in himself; when he asserts the contrary, he is lying.

Dear Friend: I have nearly died three times since morning.

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

Habit is a second nature which prevents us from knowing the first, of which it has neither the cruelties nor the enchantments.

According to a charming law of nature which is evident even in the most sophisticated societies, we live in complete ignorance of whatever we love.

We think and name in one world, we live and feel in another.

All our final resolutions are made in a state of mind which is not going to last.

The highest praise of God consists in the denial of him by the atheist who finds creation so perfect that it can dispense with a creator.

Masterpieces are no more than the shipwrecked flotsam of great minds.

Our desires cut across one another, and in this confused existence it is rare for happiness to coincide with the desire that clamoured for it.

It has been said that beauty is a promise of happiness. Conversely, the possibility of pleasure can be a beginning of beauty.

Let a prize lower my position, if it causes me to be read; that I prefer immediately to all the honors.

Lies are essential to humanity.

The inertia of the mind urges it to slide down the easy slope of imagination, rather than to climb the steep slope of introspection.

Let us leave pretty women to men without imagination.

Do not wait for life. Do not long for it. Be aware, always and at every moment, that the miracle is in the here and now.

Griefs, at the moment when they change into ideas, lose some of their power to injure our heart.

The bonds that unite another person to our self exist only in our mind.

David Sosnowski