Quotes from Marcel Proust

She was genuinely fond of us; she would have enjoyed the long luxury of weeping for our untimely decease;

It was now so much a part of him, that it could not have been torn from him without destroying him almost entirely: as they say in surgery, his love was no longer operable.

Me vuelvo hacia mi alma. Ella es la que tiene que dar con la verdad.

I received in a kiss my mother's heart, complete, without the reservation of an afterthought,

A slap in the face or a box on the ear helps to educate not only children but poets.

At least chemists can turn to analysis; sufferers from an unknown disease can call in a doctor. And criminal cases are more or less clarified by the examining magistrate. But the disconcerting actions of our fellow-men rarely reveal their motives.

since my aunt's strength, which was completely drained by the slightest exertion, returned but drop by drop into the pool of her repose, the reservoir was very slow in filling, and months would go by before she reached that surplus which other people use up in their daily activities

But then, even in the most insignificant details of our daily life, none of us can be said to constitute a material whole, which is identical for everyone, and need only be turned up like a page in an account-book or the record of a will; our social personality is created by the thoughts of other people.

Duchesse, "I happen to share his point of view. Although Elstir has done a fine portrait of me. You haven't seen it? It's not a good likeness, but it's intriguing. He's interesting to sit for. He's portrayed me like some old woman. It's modeled on Hals's The Women Regents of the Old Men's Almshouse

whether one day "Guermantes" itself may survive as anything other than a place-name, except to archaeologists who stop briefly in Combray,

at that time I still supposed that it was by means of words that one communicated the truth to others.

And certainly there were many others besides my grandmother and Albertine from whom I had assimilated a word, a glance, but of whom as individual beings I remembered nothing; a book is a great cemetery in which, for the most part, the names upon the tombs are effaced. Sometimes, on the other hand,

Any life that represents something mysterious, like some last illusion to be shattered, exerts a pull on us.

Indubitavelmente, raríssimas pessoas compreendem o caráter puramente subjetivo desse fenômeno em que consiste o amor e como é o amor uma espécie de criação de um indivíduo suplementar, distinto daquele que usa no mundo o mesmo nome, e que formamos com elementos na maioria tirados de nós mesmos. Por isso, poucos são os que podem achar naturais as proporções enormes que acaba assumindo para nós uma criatura que não é a mesma que eles veem.

Relations which are not sanctioned by the law establish bonds of kinship as manifold, as complex, and even more solid, than those which spring from marriage.

my sense of exaltation was due not only to admiration of the autumn tints but to a bodily desire. Ample source of a joy which the heart feels at first without being conscious of its cause, without understanding that it results from no external impulse!

Physical love, so unfairly disparaged, compels people to manifest the very smallest particles they possess of goodness, of self-abnegation, so much so that these particles glow even in the eyes of those immediately surrounding them.

The sort of thing people call little masterpieces, trifles that are perfect gems, in fact what I loathe most in the world. The

It is beyond question that in the remote future a Franco-German rapprochement might come into being and would be highly profitable to both countries, nor would France have the worse of the bargain, I dare say, but I have never spoken of it because the fruit is not yet ripe, and if you wish to know my opinion,

One could see that the ideas which the mediaeval artist and the mediaeval peasant (who had survived to cook for us in the nineteenth century) had of classical and of early Christian history, ideas whose inaccuracy was atoned for by their honest simplicity, were derived not from books, but from a tradition at once ancient and direct, unbroken, oral, degraded, unrecognisable, and alive.

No doubt my love for Albertine was not the most impoverished of those to which the want of will-power can reduce us, since it was not entirely platonic; she did give me physical pleasures, and she was also intelligent. But all that was secondary. What stayed in my mind was not something intelligent she might have said, but some remark that aroused my suspicion about her actions.

A book is the product of a different self from the one we manifest in our habits, in society, in our vices. If we mean to try to understand this self it is only in our inmost depths, by endeavoring to reconstruct it there, that the quest can be achieved.

It is beyond question that in the remote future a Franco-German rapprochement might come into being and would be highly profitable to both countries, nor would France have the worse of the bargain, I dare say, but I have never spoken of it because the fruit is not yet ripe, and if you wish to know my opinion, in asking our late enemies to join with us in solemn wedlock, I consider that we should be setting out to meet a severe rebuff, and that the attempt could end only in disaster.

Je ne me laisse jamais influencer par les perturbations de l'atmosphère ni par les divisions conventionnelle du temps