Quotes from Marcel Proust

One can seldom admire what one loves.

Perhaps the immobility of the things that surround us is forced upon them by our conviction that they are themselves, and not anything else, and by the immobility of our conceptions of them. For

Art is not alone in imparting charm and mystery to the most insignificant things; pain is endowed with the same power to bring them into intimate relation with ourselves.

A collection of bad love songs, tattered from overuse, has to touch us like a cemetery or a village. So what if the houses have no style, if the graves are vanishing under tasteless ornaments and inscriptions? Before an imagination sympathetic and respectful enough to conceal momentarily its aesthetic disdain, that dust may release a flock of souls, their beaks holding the still verdant dreams that gave them an inkling of the next world and let them rejoice or weep in this world.

There is a beauty in being surrounded by the foreign – seeing things from a new perspective, with new eyes

emprestando-lhe formas encantadoras de simplicidade, de aparente franqueza, e até de uma altivez independente que parecia inspirada pelo desinteresse. Isso era falso, mas a vantagem da atitude estava bem mais a favor de Morel, considerando-se que, enquanto aquele que ama está sempre forçado a voltar à carga, a insistir, pelo contrário, é fácil ao que não ama seguir uma linha reta, inflexível e graciosa.

I knew very well that this hope was chimerical. I was like a pauper who mingles fewer tears with his dry bread if he tells himself that at any moment a stranger will bequeath to him his fortune. We must all, in order to make reality more tolerable, keep alive in us a few little follies.

Like everybody who is not in love, he thought one chose the person to be loved after endless deliberations and on the basis of particular qualities or advantages.

And even before my brain, lingering in consideration of when things had happened and of what they had looked like, had sufficient impressions to enable it to identify the room, it, my body, would recall from each room in succession what the bed was like, where the doors were, how daylight came in at the windows, whether there was a passage outside, what I had had in my mind when I went to sleep, and had found there when I awoke.

Aristocracy is relative: there are all sorts of inexpensive little resorts where the son of a furniture salesman may be the arbiter of all things elegant, holding court like a young Prince of Wales.

And even in my most carnal desires, oriented always in a particular direction, concentrated round a single dream, I might have recognized as their primary motive an idea, an idea for which I would have laid down my life, at the innermost core of which, as in my day-dreams while I sat reading all afternoon in the garden at Combray, lay the notion of perfection.

Seus longos olhos azuis - mais alongados - não tinham guardado a mesma forma; continuavam sim da mesma cor, mas pareciam ter passado ao estado líquido. A tal ponto que, quando os fechava, era como quando com cortinas se impede de ver o mar.

But I consoled myself with the reflexion that in spite of everything she was for me the real point of intersection between reality and dream.

Car souvent j'ai voulu revoir une personne sans discerner qu c'était simplement parce qu'elle me rappelait un haie d'aubépines, et j'ai été induit à croir, à faire croire à un regain d'affection, par un simple désire de voyage.

the cooing of pigeons, nesting in the wall outside; shimmering and unexpected like a first hyacinth gently tearing open its nutritious heart to release its flower of sound, mauve and satin-soft, letting into my still dark and shuttered bedroom as through an opened window the warmth, the brightness, the fatigue of a first fine day.

One pretended not to know that the body of a hostess was at the disposal of all comers, provided that her visiting list showed no gaps.

the serpent hissing between the lips of Envy is so huge, and so completely fills her wide-opened mouth that the muscles of her face are strained and contorted,...

As coisas de que falamos o mais das vezes em tom de gracejo são geralmente, ao contrário, as que incomodam, mas não queremos mostrá-lo, com talvez a esperança inconfessada de uma vantagem suplementar: de justamente a pessoa com quem conversamos, ouvindo-nos gracejar daquilo, pensar que não é verdade.

She was capable of causing me pain, but no longer any joy. Pain alone kept my wearisome attachment alive.

Then it would begin to seem unintelligible, as the thoughts of a former existence must be to a reincarnate spirit

It is to such sufferings that we attach the pleasure of loving, of delighting in the most insignificant remarks of a woman, which we know to be insignificant, but which we perfume with her scent.

Princes know themselves to be princes, and are not snobs; besides, they believe themselves to be so far above everything that is not of their blood royal that noblemen and commoners appear, in the depths beneath them, to be practically on a level.

Once he has outgrown his youth, a man will rarely remain a prisoner to his insolence. He had thought it was the only way to behave; then he suddenly discovers that, even for a prince, there are such things as music, literature, not to speak of standing for the post of deputy.

It is often simply from lack of creative imagination that we do not go far enough in suffering.