Quotes from Marcel Proust

Le bonheur est dans l'amour un e tat anormal. In love, happiness is abnormal.

One says the things which one feels the need to say, and which the other will not understand: one speaks for oneself alone.

There is no man, however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived in a way the consciousness of which is so unpleasant to him in later life that he would gladly, if he could, expunge it from his memory.

We must never be afraid to go too far, for truth lies beyond.

I have built, deep in my heart, a chapel filled with you.

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

It is grief that develops the powers of the mind.

Until I saw Chardin's painting, I never realized how much beauty lay around me in my parents' house, in the half-cleared table, in the corner of a tablecloth left awry, in the knife beside the empty oyster shell.

There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we believe we left without having lived them: those we spent with a favourite book.

It is always thus, impaled by a state of mind which is destined not to last, that we make our irrevocable decisions.

People wish to learn to swim and at the same time to keep one foot on the ground.

People can have many different kinds of pleasure. The real one is that for which they will forsake the others.

Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions, and composed our masterpieces. Never will the world know all it owes to them, nor all they have suffered to enrich us.

At the heart of our friendly or purely social relations, there lurks a hostility momentarily cured but recurring in fits and starts.

If only for the sake of elegance, I try to remain morally pure.

We must love men more than things, and I admire and weep more for the soldiers than for the churches which were only the recording of an heroic gesture which today is reenacted at every moment.

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

That which we remember of our conduct is ignored by our closest neighbour; but that which we have forgotten having said, or even what we never said, will cause laughter even into the next world.

The time which we have at our disposal every day is elastic; the passions that we feel expand it, those that we inspire contract it; and habit fills up the rest.

The time which we have at our disposal every day is elastic; the passions that we feel expand it, those that we inspire contract it; and habit fills up what remains.

The opinions which we hold of one another, our relations with friends and kinsfolk are in no sense permanent, save in appearance, but are as eternally fluid as the sea itself.

We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full.

The past not merely is not fugitive, it remains present.

Everything great in the world is done by neurotics; they alone founded our religions and created our masterpieces. Never will the world know how much it owes to them, nor what they have suffered in order to bestow their gifts on us. We enjoy fine music, beautiful pictures, a thousand exquisite things, but we do not know what they cost those who wrought them in sleeplessness, tears, spasmodic laughter, rashes, asthma, epilepsy, a terror of death which is worse than any of these.