Quotes from Marcel Proust

Illness is the doctor to whom we pay most heed; to kindness, to knowledge, we make promise only; pain we obey.

Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and composed our masterpieces.

I have a horror of sunsets; they're so romantic, so operatic.

The true voyage of discovery is not a journey to a new place; it is learning to see with new eyes.

My destination is no longer a place, rather a new way of seeing.

Always try to keep a patch of sky above your life.

I had come in time to learn that it was a mistake to smile a friendly smile when somebody made a fool of me.

Like a kaleidoscope which is every now and then given a turn, society arranges successively in different orders elements which one would have supposed immutable, and composes a new pattern.

Even from the simplest, the most realistic point of view, the countries which we long for occupy, at any given moment, a far larger place in our actual life than the country in which we happen to be.

We are able to find everything in our memory, which is like a dispensary or chemical laboratory in which chance steers our hand sometimes to a soothing drug and sometimes to a dangerous poison.

The real stars of society are tired of appearing there. He who is curious to gaze at them must often migrate to another hemisphere, where they are more or less alone.

Adultery breathes new life into marriages which have been left for dead.

A powerful idea communicates some of its strength to him who challenges it.

For neither our greatest fears nor our greatest hopes are beyond the limits of our strength--we are able in the end both to dominate the first and to achieve the second.

Sometimes in this life, under the stress of an exceptional emotion, people do say what they think.

Lies are essential to humanity. They are perhaps as important as the pursuit of pleasure and moreover are dictated by that pursuit.

We feel in one world, we think and name in another. Between the two we can set up a system of references, but we cannot fill in the gap.

The world was not created once and for all time for each of us individually. There are added to it in the course of our life things of which we have never had any suspicion.

The facts of life do not penetrate to the sphere in which our beliefs are cherished; they did not engender those beliefs, and they are powerless to destroy them.

Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.

Memory nourishes the heart, and grief abates.

Everything that seems imperishable tends to extinguishment.

Let us be grateful to people who make us happy.

If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time.