Quotes from Marcel Proust

Certainly we are obliged to relive our particular suffering with the courage of a physician who tries over again upon himself an experiment with a dangerous serum.

A photograph acquires something of the dignity which it ordinarily lacks when it ceases to be a reproduction of reality and shows us things that no longer exist.

time would come when I should have to digest the cakes that I took without noticing them.

And so these women, either misunderstanding or else scorning the influence that publicity has today acquired, are fashionable for the Queen of Spain, but unrecognized by the crowd, because the first knows and the second do not know who they are.

The dead last so short a time … Alas, in the coffin they crumble into dust, Less quickly than in our hearts!

We can remember the truth because it bears a name, has roots in the past, but an improvised lie is quickly forgotten.

notre personnalité sociale est une création de la pensée des autres. Même l'acte si simple que nous appelons « voir une personne que nous connaissons » est en partie un acte intellectuel

Having had time to come, Albertine must have arrived. I went straight to Françoise: "Is Mlle Albertine here?" "No one has come." Good God, did that mean that no one would be coming? I was in torment, Albertine's visit now seeming all the more desirable for being less certain.

We have of the universe only inchoate, fragmentary visions, which we complement by arbitrary associations of ideas, creative of dangerous illusions.

The intellect does not recognise situations in life which have no issue.

I have never said a word to you before about my illness. But as you asked me, and as now I may die at any moment … But whatever I do I mustn't make you late; you're dining out, remember," he added, because he knew that for other people their own social obligations took precedence of the death of a friend, and could put himself in her place by dint of his instinctive politeness.

Prince d'Agrigente or the Prince de Cystria—whose masks of flesh and absent or vulgar intelligence had transformed them into rather ordinary specimens, to the point where I ended up feeling that I had landed on the Guermantes doormat not as upon the supposed threshold but at the terminus of the magic world of names.

as those old engravings of the 'Cenacolo,' or that painting by Gentile Bellini, in which one sees, in a state in which they no longer exist, the masterpiece of Leonardo and the portico of Saint Mark's. We

The only true paradises are the paradises that we have lost.

But we lied to each other, Robert and I, as in every conversation when one friend is genuinely anxious to help another who is desperately in love. The friend who is being counsellor, prop, comforter, may pity the other's distress but cannot share it, and the kinder he is to him the more he has to lie.

Apenas discerni que repetir o que toda a gente pensava não era em política um sinal de inferioridade, mas de superioridade.

C'est le malheur des êtres de n'être pour nous que des planches de collections fort usables dans notre pensée.

Os nomes que designam as coisas respondem sempre a uma noção da inteligência, estranha às nossas impressões verdadeiras e que nos força a eliminar delas tudo o que não se reporte a essa noção.

The constant vision of this imaginary happiness helped me to bear the ruining of my real happiness. With a woman who does not love us, as with someone who has died, the knowledge that there is nothing left to hope for does not prevent us from going on waiting.

all this made of the church for me something entirely different from the rest of the town: an edifice occupying, so to speak, a four-dimensional space—the name of the fourth being Time—extending through the centuries its ancient nave, which, bay after bay, chapel after chapel, seemed to stretch across and conquer not merely a few yards of soil, but each successive epoch from which it emerged triumphant,

Neither our greatest fears nor our greatest hopes are beyond the limits of our strength – we are able in the end to dominate the first and to achieve the second.

the object of her most trivial thoughts, and the goal of her most important actions

Un être réel, si profondément que nous sympathisions avec lui, pour une grande part est perçu par nos sens, c'est-à-dire nous reste opaque, offre un poids mort que notre sensibilité ne peut soulever.

How many persons, cities, roads does not jealousy make us eager thus to know? It is a thirst for knowledge thanks to which, with regard to various isolated points, we end by acquiring every possible notion in turn except those that we require. We can never tell whether a suspicion will not arise, for, all of a sudden, we recall a sentence that was not clear, an alibi that cannot have been given us without a purpose.