Quotes from Marcel Proust

The valet de chambre had entered. I did not tell him that I had rung several times, for I realized that hitherto all I had done was to dream that I had rung. I was alarmed to think, however, that this dream had had the clarity of a cognition. Could cognition, by the same token, have the unreality of a dream?

It is true that these changes have occurred to us without our being aware of them; but the distance between the memory which suddenly returns and our present personality as similarly between two memories of different years and places, is so great that it would suffice, apart from their specific uniqueness, to make comparison between them impossible.

the sources of great events are like those of rivers, in vain do we explore the earth's surface, we can never find them.

it was only at that moment—more than a year after her burial, because of the anachronism which so often prevents the calendar of facts from corresponding to the calendar of feelings—that I became conscious that she was dead.

For, medicine being a compendium of the successive and contradictory mistakes of medical practitioners, when we summon the wisest of them to our aid the chances are that we may be relying on a scientific truth the error of which will be recognised in a few years' time.

in the state of mind in which we "observe" we are a long way below the level to which we rise when we create.

It is often only for want of the creative spirit that we do not go far enough in suffering. And the most terrible reality brings us, at the same time as suffering, the joy of a beautiful discovery, for all that it does is to lend a new and explicit form to what we had long been turning over in our minds without suspecting

Reality is formed only by memory.

Y, desde luego, eso no quiere decir que, cuando el Sr.Legranin echaba pestes contra los esnobs, no fuese sincero. No podía saber, al menos por sí mismo, que él sí lo era, pues nunca conocemos sino las pasiones de los demás y lo que llegamos a saber de las nuestras sólo a ellos se lo debemos

And nothing reminds me so much of the monthly parts of Notre-Dame de Paris, and of various books by Gérard de Nerval, that used to hang outside the grocer's door at Combray,

such suffering, owed to her, in compensation, the possibility of receiving the strange call which had come to me and which I would never again cease to hear—as it were the promise that something else existed, something perhaps reachable through art, besides the nothingness that I had found in all pleasures, and even in love, and that even if my life seemed so empty, at least it was not over.

Pois desde que se está enamorado, todos os pequenos privilégios desconhecidos que a gente possui, desejaria poder divulgá-los à mulher a quem ama, como fazem na vida os deserdados e os importunos. Sentimos que ela os ignore, procuramos consolar-nos dizendo conosco mesmos que, justamente porque não são jamais visíveis, talvez ela acrescente à ideia que tem de nós essa possibilidade de vantagens desconhecidas.

And grief is as potent in altering reality as is drunkenness

Los hechos no penetran en el mundo donde viven nuestras creencias, y como no les dieron vida no las pueden matar; pueden estar desmintiéndolas constantemente sin debilitarlas, y un alud de desgracia o enfermedades que una tras otra padece una familia, no le hace dudar de la bondad de su Dios ni de la pericia de su médico.

The contempt which my father had for my kind of intelligence was so far tempered by his natural affection for me that, in practice, his attitude towards anything that I might do was one of blind indulgence.

Let us simply recall the wish to appear natural and forthcoming, the instinctive movement to conceal a secret lovers' meeting, a mixture of modesty and ostentation, the need to speak of what is so pleasant to ourselves and to show that we are loved, a partial understanding of what the other person already knows, or guesses, which, outrunning or falling short of his understanding, constantly over- or under-estimates it, the involuntary drive to take risks or to cut one's losses.

love which, ever unsatisfied, lives always in the moment that is about to come)?

She comes out with things, you know, that keep you pondering for hours. There's really something quite Pythian about her!

We dream a great deal of paradise, or, rather, of numerous successive paradises, but they are all, long before we die, paradises lost, in which we would feel lost.

That purpose allows the chain of spent days to slip away, holding on only to the very end of it, often of a quite different metal from the links that have vanished in the night, and in the journey which we make through life, counts as real only in the place in which we at any given moment are.

The Louvre and all the museums were closed and when one read at the head of an article "Sensational Exhibition" one might be certain it was not an exhibition of pictures but of dresses destined to quicken "those delicate artistic delights of which Parisian women have been too long deprived.

He was now nothing but a ruin, but a splendid one; grander than a ruin, he had the romantic beauty of a rock beaten by a tempest. Scourged from every side by the waves of suffering, by rage at his suffering, his face, slowly crumbling like a block of granite almost submerged by the towering seas, retained the style, the suavity I had always admired.

Besides he was out of sympathy with the modern Sorbonne, where ideas of scientific exactitude, after the German model, were beginning to prevail over humanism.

Al??kanl?k! Zihnimizin haftalar boyunca geçici bir düzende azap çekmesine göz yuman al??kanl?k, ama o olmasa, kendi imkanlar?yla s?n?rl? kalan zihnimizin bize içinde ya?anabilecek bir bar?nak sunamayaca?? için, her ?eye ra?men buldu?u zaman sevindi?i, o becerikli ama a??rkanl? düzenliyici!