Quotes from Marcel Proust

Our shadows, now parallel, now close together and joined, traced an exquisite pattern at our feet.

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.

The only true voyage of discovery, . . . would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes.

The only true voyage would be not to travel through a hundred different lands, but to see the same land through a hundred different pairs of eyes.

Your soul is a dark forest. But the trees are of a particular species, they are genealogical trees.

What a profound significance small things assume when the woman we love conceals them from us.

Love is not vain because it is frustrated, but because it is fulfilled. The people we love turn to ashes when we posess them.

Love is an incurable malady like those pathetic states in which rheumatism affords the sufferer a brief respite only to be replaced by epileptiform headaches.

There can be no peace of mind in love, since the advantage one has secured is never anything but a fresh starting-point for future desires.

The stellar universe is not so difficult to understand as the real actions of other people, especially of the people with whom we are in love.

For, just as in the beginning it is formed by desire, so afterwards love is kept in existence only by painful anxiety.

Like many intellectuals, he was incapable of saying a simple thing in a simple way.

Words do not change their meanings so drastically in the course of centuries as, in our minds, names do in the course of a year or two.

The most familiar precepts are not always the truest.

Death is in truth an illness from which we recover

In summoning even the wisest of physicians to our aid, it is probably that he is relying upon a scientific "truth", the error of which will become obvious in just a few years' time.

The truth is that men can have several sorts of pleasure. The true pleasure is the one for which they abandon the other.

There is not a woman in the world the possession of whom is as precious as that of the truths which she reveals to us by causing us to suffer.

We don't receive wisdom we must discover it for ourselves.

La possession de ce qu'on aime est une joie plus grande encore que l'amour. Possessing what one loves is an even greater joy than love itself.

We were resigned to suffering, thinking that we loved outside ourselves, and we perceive that our love is a function of our sorrow, that our love perhaps is our sorrow.

In love, happiness is an abnormal state.

There is no doubt that a person's charms are less frequently a cause of love than a remark such as: 'No, this evening I shan't be free'.

It is a mistake to speak of a bad choice in love, since, as soon as a choice exists, it can only be bad.