Quotes from Marcel Proust

Une œuvre où il y a des théories est comme un objet sur lequel on laisse la marque du prix.

When a man is asleep, he has in a circle round him the chain of the hours, the sequence of the years, the order of the heavenly host.

But the true nature which we repress continues nevertheless to abide within us. Thus it is that at times, if we read the latest masterpiece of a man of genius, we are delighted to find in it all those of our own reflexions which we have despised, joys and sorrows which we have repressed, a whole world of feelings we have scorned, and whose value the book in which we discover them afresh suddenly teaches us.

Il faudrait choisir de cesser de souffrir ou de cesser d'aimer.

Aliás, o amor é um mal incurável como aquelas diáteses em que o reumatismo só dá tréguas para ceder lugar a enxaquecas epileptiformes.

Quantas pessoas, cidades, caminhos, não nos torna assim o ciúme ávidos de conhecer? Ele é uma sede de saber graças à qual, sobre pontos isolados uns dos outros, acabamos tendo sucessivamente todas as noções possíveis, exceto as que desejaríamos.

But she was wrong; it was what gave her away; she had not taken into account that this fragmentary detail of the truth had sharp edges which could not be made to fit in, except to those contiguous fragments of the truth from which she had arbitrarily detached it, edges which, whatever the fictitious details in which she might embed it, would continue to shew, by their overlapping angles and by the gaps which she had forgotten to fill, that its proper place was elsewhere.

Just is not by other men of intelligence that an intelligent an is afraid of being thought a fool, so it is not by the great gentleman but by boors and 'bounders' that a man of fashion is afraid of finding his social value underrated. Three-fourths of the mental ingenuity displayed, of the social falsehoods scattered broadcast ever since the world began by people whose importance they have served only to diminish, have been aimed at inferiors.

It was like every attitude or action which reveals a man's deep and hidden character; they bear no relation to what he has previously said, and we cannot confirm our suspicions by the culprit's evidence, for he will admit nothing; we are reduced to the evidence of our own senses, and we ask ourselves, in the face of this detached and incoherent fragment of recollection, whether indeed our senses have not been the victims of a hallucination...

Do you imagine that the poisonous spittle of five hundred little men of your sort, hoisted on to each other's shoulders, could even drool down on to the tips of my august toes?

première et légère esquisse du chagrin que cause une séparation et des progrès irréguliers de l'oubli

Well, how could a reader notice that? There may be something lacking there I admit. But heavens above, they ought to count themselves lucky! It's full enough of good things as it is, far more than they usually get.

that form of the instinct of self-preservation with which we guard everything that is best in ourselves...

whose inferiority proclaimed her own supremacy so loud...

Aunt Léonie who, after the death of her husband, my Uncle Octave, no longer wished to leave, first Combray, then within Combray her house, then her bedroom, then her bed and no longer 'came down', always lying in an uncertain state of grief, physical debility, illness, obsession and piety.

Love is space and time made perceptible to the heart.

As profession recognizes profession, so, too, does vice.

A certain similarity exists, although the type evolves, between all the women we love, a similarity that is due to the fixity of our own temperament, which it is that chooses them, eliminating all those who would not be at once our opposite and our complement, fitted that is to say to gratify our senses and to wring our heart.

myself seemed actually to have become the subject of my book: a church, a quartet, the rivalry between François I and Charles V

That is why the better part of our memories exists outside us, in a blatter of rain, in the smell of an unaired room or of the first crackling brushwood fire in a cold grate: wherever, in short, we happen upon what our mind, having no use for it, had rejected, the last treasure that the past has in store, the richest, that which, when all our flow of tears seems to have dried at the source, can make us weep again.

Les plats se lisent et les livres se mangent.

My grandmother had a love which found in me so totally its complement, its goal, its constant lodestar, that the genius of great men, all the genius that might ever have existed from the beginning of the world, would have been less precious to my grandmother than a single one of my defects.

I felt that I was not penetrating to the full depth of my impression, that something more lay behind that mobility, that luminosity, something which they seemed at once to contain and to conceal.

Then it would begin to seem unintelligible, as the thoughts of a former existence must be to a reincarnate spirit; the subject of my book would separate itself from me, leaving me free to choose whether I would form part of it or no; and at the same time my sight would return and I would be astonished to find myself in a state of darkness, pleasant and restful enough for the eyes, and even more, perhaps, for my mind, to which it appeared incomprehensible, without a cause, a matter dark indeed.