Quotes from Marcel Proust

Thus the Verdurins gave their dinners (soon, after the death of M. Verdurin, Mme Verdurin alone) and M. de Charlus went about his pleasures, without realising that the Germans — immobilised, it is true, by a bleeding barrier which was always being renewed — were at an hour's automobile drive from Paris.

I had allowed myself to murmur a few impatient and hurtful words, which, I had sensed from the way her face contracted, had struck home, had wounded her; it was I whom they were lacerating, now that the consolation of a thousand kisses was forever impossible.

He was the offended party, he was owed an explanation. In fact there is almost always, attached to the idea of a conversation which might clear up a misunderstanding, some other idea which for one reason or another makes us reluctant to have that conversation.

For since missing a woman is no more than reviving a love that remains subject to the same laws as all love, the force of my regret was increased by the same causes which, while Albertine was alive, would have augmented my love for her and which had always given pride of place to jealousy and pain.

Then, at last, we understood that the sort of terror in which Françoise had lived of my aunt's harsh words, her suspicions and her anger, had developed in her a sentiment which we had mistaken for hatred, and which was really veneration and love.

On ne reçoit pas la sagesse, il faut la découvrir soi-même après un trajet que personne ne peut faire pour nous, ne peut nous épargner.

think I would be lying if I said that the painful and perpetual mistrust that Albertine was to inspire in me had already begun, let alone the particular, above all Gomorran, character which that mistrust was to assume.

Uma renúncia não é sempre total desde o princípio, quando a decidimos com a nossa alma antiga e antes de que, em reação, tenha ela agido sobre nós, quer se trate da renúncia de um doente, de um monge, de um artista, de um herói.

Yes, yes, yes, yes, I understand all that," with a precision and a tone of intelligence which for some time deceived me; but other people, as we get to know them, are like a metal dipped in an acid bath, and we see them gradually lose their good qualities (and their bad qualities too, at times

Moreover, I realised that life can be considered commonplace in spite of its appearing so beautiful at particular moments because in the former case one judges and underrates it on quite other grounds than itself, upon images which have no life in them.

partiellement revêtue d'acajou, où, dès la première

A philosopher who was not sufficiently modern for her, Leibniz, has said that the journey from the intellect to the heart is a long one.

intoxication makes real for an hour or two a subjective idealism, pure phenomenism; nothing is left now but appearances, nothing exists save as a function of our sublime self. This is not to say that a genuine love, if we have one, cannot survive in such conditions. But we feel so unmistakably, as though in a new atmosphere, that unknown pressures have altered the dimensions of that sentiment that we can no longer consider it in the old way

When a man is asleep, he has in a circle round him the chain of the hours, the sequence of the years, the order of the heavenly host. Instinctively, when he awakes, he looks to these, and in an instant reads off his own position on the earth's surface and the amount of time that has elapsed during his slumbers; but this ordered procession is apt to grow confused, and to break its ranks.

All the greatest things we know have come to us from neurotics. It is they and they only who have founded religions and created great works of art. Never will the world be conscious of how much it owes to them, nor above all of what they have suffered in order to bestow their gifts on it

In short, my aunt stipulated, at one and the same time, that whoever came to see her must approve of her way of life, commiserate with her in her sufferings, and assure her of an ultimate recovery

But never again would I be able to erase that contraction from her face, or that suffering from her heart, or, rather, from my own; for, since the dead exist only in us, it is ourselves that we strike unrelentingly when we persist in remembering the blows we have dealt them. I clung to these sorrows, however cruel they might be, with all my strength, for I felt that they were the effect of my memory of my grandmother, the proof that this memory which I had was indeed present in me.

Meus pobres pilriteirinhos!", dizia eu, chorando. "Vocês, só vocês não me dariam pesar, não me obrigariam a partir! Nunca me fizeram mal! Sempre hei de querer bem a vocês." E enxugando os olhos, eu lhes prometia, para quando fosse grande, não imitar a vida insensata dos outros homens, e, até mesmo em Paris, nos dias de primavera, em vez de ir fazer visitas e ouvir tolices, sair para os campos a ver as primeiras flores de pilriteiro.

Cuál puede ser ese desconocido estado que no trae consigo ninguna prueba lógica, sino la evidencia de su felicidad, y de su realidad junto a la que se desvanecen todas las restantes realidades?

The person that I shall be after death has no more reason to remember the man whom I have been since my birth than the latter to remember what I was before it.

the memory of a certain image is only regret for a certain moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fleeting, alas, as the years.

Snobbery is with certain people analogous to those beverages in which the agreeable is mixed with the beneficial.

Ao falar, imaginamos sempre que nos escutam com os nossos ouvidos, com a nossa alma.

It's no more obsolete than the Iliad. I may