Quotes from Marcel Proust

Three-quarters of the mental ingenuity and the mendacious boasting squandered ever since the world began by people who are only cheapened thereby, have been aimed at inferiors.

Pasaba largas horas encantadoras, a solas consigo mismo, el único invitado que olvidara invitar a comer durante su vida.

We fear more than the loss of anything else the disappearance of possessions that have remained outside ourselves, because our hearts have not taken possession of them.

True life life at last discovered and illuminated the only life therefore really lived that life is literature.

As a surgical patient, by means of a local anaesthetic, can look on with a clear consciousness while an operation is being performed upon him and yet feel nothing, I could repeat to myself some favourite lines, or watch my grandfather attempting to talk to Swann about the Duc d'Audriffet-Pasquier, without being able to kindle any emotion from one or amusement from the other.

the objects which we admire have no absolute value in themselves...

Let an illness, a duel, a runaway horse make us see death face to face, and how richly we should have enjoyed the life of pleasure, the travels in unknown lands, which are about to be snatched from us! And no sooner is the danger past than we resume once more the same dull life in which none of those delights existed for us.

Good God! Think of listening to Wagner for a whole fortnight with a woman who takes about as much interest in music as a tone-deaf newt - that would be fun!

But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, still, alone, more fragile, but with more vitality, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfaltering, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.

Alexis had entered that ardent period in which the body labors so robustly at raising its palaces between the flesh and the soul that the soul quickly seems to have vanished, until the day when illness or sorrow has slowly undermined the barriers and transcended the painful fissure, allowing the soul to reappear.

He had so long since ceased to direct his life toward any ideal goal, and had confined himself to the pursuit of quotidian satisfactions, that he had come to believe, though without ever formally stating his belief even to himself that he would remain all his life in that condition, which only death could alter.

For in order to really suffer at the hands of a woman one must have believed in her completely.

real books should be the offspring not of daylight and casual talk but of darkness and silence

Queremos buscar en las cosas, que por eso nos son preciosas, el reflejo que sobre ellas lanza nuestra alma, y es grande nuestra decepción al ver que en la Naturaleza no tienen aquel encanto que en nuestro pensamiento les prestaba la proximidad de ciertas ideas; y muchas veces convertimos todas las fuerzas del alma en destreza y en esplendor, destinados a accionar, sobre unos seres que sentimos perfectamente que están fuera de nosotros y no alcanzaremos nunca.

it was with an unusual intensity of pleasure, a pleasure destined to have a lasting effect upon his character and conduct...

Our slightest desire, though unique as a chord, nevertheless includes the fundamental notes on which the whole of our life is built. And sometimes, if we were to eliminate one of them, even one that we do not hear, that we are not aware of, one that has no connexion with the object of our quest, we would nevertheless see our whole desire for that object disappear.

He stood gazing at her; traces of the old fresco were apparent in her face and limbs, and these he tried incessantly, afterwards, to recapture, both when he was with Odette, and when he was only thinking of her in her absence; and, albeit his admiration for the Florentine masterpiece was probably based upon his discovery that it had been reproduced in her, the similarity enhanced her beauty also, and rendered her more precious in his sight.

the kiss, the bodily surrender which would seem natural and but moderately attractive...

When you work to please others you can't succeed, but the things you do to satisfy yourself stand a chance of catching someone's interest.

A work in which there are theories is like an object upon which the price is marked.

And the others too were beginning to remark in Swann that abnormal, excessive, shameful and deserved senescence of bachelors, of all those for whom it seems that the great day which knows no morrow must be longer than for other men, since for them it is a void of promise, and from its dawn the moments steadily accumulate without any subsequent partition among offspring.

But the harshness of his steely glare was compensated by the softness of his cotton gloves, so that, as he approached Swann, he seemed to be exhibiting at once an utter contempt for his person and the most tender regard for his hat.

An impression of love is out of proportion to the other impressions of life, but when it is lost in their midst we are incapable of appreciating it.

For man is that ageless creature who has the faculty of becoming many years younger in a few seconds, and who, surrounded by the walls of the time through which he has lived, floats within them as in a pool the surface-level of which is constantly changing so as to bring him within range now of one epoch, now of another.