Quotes from Marcel Proust

I do my intellectual work within myself, and once with other people, it's more or less irrelevant to me that they're intelligent, as long as they are kind, sincere etc."

Her face was plastered with layers of powder and looked like a face of stone. And with her noble profile, she seemed, on the triangular, moss-covered pedestal hidden by her cape, like a crumbling goddess in a park.

She can't have understood you: you are so utterly different from ordinary men. That's what I liked about you when I first saw you; I felt at once that you weren't like everybody else.

Well, well, what I always say is, one should never argue about plays or novels. Everyone has his own way of looking at things, and what may be horrible to you is, perhaps, just what I like best.

We believe that we may change things around us to suit our desires, we believe this because otherwise we can see no acceptable solution. We do not think of the solution which occurs most frequently and which is also acceptable: when we do not manage to change things to suit our desires, but our desires gradually change. We become indifferent to a situation which we had hoped to change when we found it unbearable.

We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness that no one else can take for us, that no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world.

machinery' of life at Versailles; and was able, too, to persuade herself that her silence, a shade of good humour or of arrogance on her features, would provide Françoise with matter for a mental commentary as tense with passion and terror, as did the silence, the good

There is probably no one, however rigid his virtue, who is not liable to find himself, by the complexity of circumstances, living at close quarters with the very vice which he himself has been most outspoken in condemning

The stellar universe is not so difficult of comprehension as the real actions of other people.

For in this respect love is not like war; after the battle is ended we renew the fight with keener ardour, which we never cease to intensify the more thoroughly we are defeated, provided always that we are still in a position to give battle.

she judged frivolous reading to be as unhealthy as sweets and pastries...

The flowers which played then among the grass, the water which rippled past in the sunshine, the whole landscape which served as environment to their apparition lingers around the memory of them still with its unconscious or unheeding air;...

Sentimos en un mundo, pensamos y nombramos en otro

so great can the gulf be between a lying woman's invention and the idea which her lover, relying on her lies, has formed of the truth.

But he did not tell her, for he realised how petty it would appear to her, and how different from what she had expected, less sensational and less touching; he was afraid, too, lest, disillusioned in the matter of art, she might at the same time be disillusioned in the greater matter of love.

Why did you not forget your heart also? I should never have let you have that back." ...

For instinct dictates our duty and the intellect supplies us with pretexts for evading it.

The facts of life do not penetrate to the sphere in which our beliefs are cherished; as it was not they that endangered those beliefs, so they are powerless to destroy them; they can aim at them continual blows of contradiction and disproof without weakening them; and an avalanche of miseries and maladies coming, one after another, without interruption into the bosom of a family, will not make it lose faith in either the clemency of its God or the capacity of its physician.

Long after the poor departed have gone from our hearts, their insignificant dust continues to be mingled, to be used as an alloy, with the events of the past.

learned to distinguish between these states which reigned alternately in my mind, during certain periods, going so far as to divide every day between them, each one returning to dispossess the other with the regularity of a fever and ague: contiguous, and yet so foreign to one another, so devoid of means of communication, that I could no longer understand, or even picture to myself, in one state what I had desired or dreaded or even done in the other.

of all the seeds that fly about the world, the one with the most solid wings, enabling it to be scattered at the greatest distance from its point of origin, is still a joke.

Soon, what was tedious was everything. 'Beautiful things, they're so tedious! Paintings, they're enough to drive you mad...How right you are, it's so tedious, writing letters!' In the end it was life itself that she declared to us was a bore, without one quite knowing from where she was taking her term of comparison.

pretention is very close to stupidity and that simplicity has a less visible but still gratifying aspect.

Jealousy is often only an anxious need to be tyrannical applied to matters of love.