Quotes from Marcel Proust

she was also an extremely poor one, and, as he himself had lost his fortune, they went scarcely anywhere, and were the sort of people who were apt to be overlooked except on great occasions, when they had the good fortune to bury or marry a relative.

E eu continuava resistindo. E essa resistência me custava cada vez menos esforço, porque, por muito apego que se tenha ao veneno que nos está fazendo mal, quando por uma necessidade se passa algum tempo sem ingeri-lo, não é possível deixar de apreciar o descanso, que antes era coisa desconhecida, e a ausência de emoções e sofrimentos.

É singular que certa ordem de atos secretos tenha como consequência exterior um mode de falar ou gesticular que os revela.

Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and composed our masterpieces.

they stand like giants immersed in Time.

So rarely do we meet either with easy success or with irreversible defeat.

E com essa intermitente grosseria que lhe voltava logo que ele não mais sofria e que rebaixava o nível de seu caráter moral, exclamou consigo mesmo: "E dizer que eu estraguei anos inteiros de minha vida, que desejei a morte, que tive o meu maior amor, por uma mulher que não me agradava, que não era o meu tipo!".

wand. Until then, because I had not understood, I had not seen.

She took up the defence of the Republic, and against its anti-clericalism had not more to say than: "I should be equally annoyed whether they prevented me from hearing mass when I wanted to, or forced me to hear it when I didn't!

with Bergotte, the embarrassment of the name, laden with its disconcerting preconceptions, was insignificant compared with the chagrin I felt at the prospect of tying this man with his goatee to the work I knew, as though to a balloon, and wondering whether it might still have the power to become airborne.

the past having often thought with terror that one day he would cease to be in love with Odette, he had promised himself to be vigilant and, as soon as he felt his love was beginning to leave him, to cling to it, to hold it back. But now to the weakening of his love there corresponded a simultaneous weakening of his desire to remain in love. For one cannot change, that is to say become another person, while continuing to acquiesce to the feelings of the person one has ceased to be.

the fact was that I had recognized it as having been mentioned to me as a remarkable work by the teacher or friend who appeared to me at that period to hold the secret of the truth and beauty half sensed, half incomprehensible, the knowledge of which was the goal, vague but permanent, of my thoughts.

For, if unduly prolonged, the rapture of waiting for Eulalie became a torture,

there is in the sadist — good as he may be, indeed the better he is — a thirst for evil that malefactors cannot satisfy.

When we are waiting, the double trajectory, from the ear that gathers in the sounds to the mind that processes and analyzes them, and from the mind to the heart to which it transmits its results, is so rapid that we are unable even to perceive its duration, and we seem to be listening directly with our hearts.

He who is in the wrong believes himself in the right, as was the case with Germany, and he who is in the right supports it with arguments which only appear irrefutable to him because they respond to his anger. In these quarrels between individuals, in order to be convinced that one of the parties is in the right — the surest plan is to be that party; no onlooker will ever be so: completely convinced of it.

Ideas are substitutes for sorrows; when the latter change into ideas they lose part of their noxious action on our hearts and even at the first instant their very transformation disengages a feeling of joy. Substitutes only in the order of time, however, for it would seem that the first element is idea and that sorrow is only the mode in which certain ideas first enter us.

my body ... faithful guardian of a past which my mind should never have forgotten, brought back before my eyes ....

A cordial nature exaggerates a friend's qualities with as much pleasure as a mischievous one finds in depreciating them.

Pero, sobre todo, de igual suerte que los escritores llegan a menudo a un poder de concentración de que les hubiera dispensado el régimen de libertad política o de anarquía literaria, cuando están atados de pies y manos por la tiranía de un monarca o de una poética, por los rigores de las reglas prosódicas o de una religión de Estado, así Francisca, como no podía replicarnos de una manera explícita, hablaba como Tiresias y hubiera escrito como Tácito.

Love is nothing more perhaps than the stimulation of those eddies which, in the wake of an emotion, stir the soul

Medicine, when it fails to cure, busies itself with changing the sense of verbs and pronouns.

nothing is more limited than vice. In that sense one can really use a common expression and say that one is always turning in the same vicious circle. "How

It is the explanation that opens our eyes; the dispelling of an error gives us an additional sense.