Quotes from Marcel Proust

Wars are fought for the benefit of oligarchs, triumphs bought with the blood of peons.

We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.

Instead of seeking new landscapes, develop new eyes.

Illness is the most heeded of doctors: to goodness and wisdom we only make promises; pain we obey.

There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book.

Three-quarters of the sicknesses of intelligent people come from their intelligence. They need at least a doctor who can understand this sickness.

As long as men are free to ask what they must, free to say what they think, free to think what they will, freedom can never be lost and science can never regress.

In theory one is aware that the earth revolves, but in practice one does not perceive it, the ground upon which one treads seems not to move, and one can live undisturbed. So it is with Time in one's life.

A woman whom we need and who makes us suffer elicits from us a whole gamut of feelings far more profound and vital than a man of genius who interests us.

No man is a complete mystery except to himself.

Often it is just lack of imagination that keeps a man from suffering very much.

All the mind's activity is easy if it is not subjected to reality.

We become moral when we are unhappy.

Laissons les jolies femmes aux hommes sans imagination. Leave the pretty women for the men without imagination.

I had long since given up trying to extract from a woman as it were the square root of her unknown quantity, the mystery of which a mere introduction was generally enough to dispel.

All our final decisions are made in a state of mind that is not going to last.

When you work to please others you can't succeed, but the things you do to satisfy yourself stand a chance of catching someone's interest.

A work in which there are theories is like an object which still has the ticket that shows its price.

A fashionable milieu is one in which everybody's opinion is made up of the opinion of all the others. Has everybody a different opinion? Then it is a literary milieu.

When we have passed a certain age, the soul of the child we were and the souls of the dead from whom we have sprung come to lavish on us their riches and their spells.

She was "a woman of uncertain age.

We live not alone but chained to a creature of a different kingdom: our body.

All the great things we know have come to us from neurotics. It is they who have founded religions and created great works of art.

Thanks to art, instead of seeing one world, our own, we see it multiplied and as many original artists as there are, so many worlds are at our disposal.