Quotes from Marcel Proust

I believe that all true art is classic, but the dictates of the mind rarely permit of its being recognized as such when it first appears.

A work should convey its entire meaning by itself, imposing it on the spectator even before he knows what the subject is.

What artists call posterity is the posterity of the work of art.

with one image he would make that beauty explode into me.

No exile at the South Pole or on the summit of Mont Blanc separates us more effectively from others than the practice of a hidden vice.

To the pure all things are pure!

The courage of one's opinions is always a form of calculating cowardice in the eyes of the "other side.

We shall see later on that the diversity of the forms of death that circulate invisibly is the cause of the peculiar unexpectedness of obituary notices in the newspapers.

For every sin there is forgiveness.

The opinions which we hold of one another, our relations with friends and kinfolk are in no sense permanent, save in appearance, but are as eternally fluid as the sea itself

Desire makes everything blossom; possession makes everything wither and fade.

We do not succeed in changing things according to our desire, but gradually our desire changes.

Desire makes everything blossom

There's nothing like desire to prevent the things one says from having any resemblance to the things in one's mind.

Fashions, being themselves begotten of the desire for change, are quick to change also.

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.

To be an artist is to fail, as no other dare to fail... failure is his world and the shrink from it desertion

Time, which changes people, does not alter the image we have retained of them.

Let us leave the beautiful women to men with no imagination.

The real voyage of discovery consists of not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.

The opinions which we hold of one another, our relations with friends and kinfolk are in no sense permanent, save in appearance, but are as eternally fluid as the sea itself

For each illness that doctors cure with medicine, they provoke ten in healthy people by inoculating them with the virus that is a thousand times more powerful than any microbe: the idea that one is ill.

The paradoxes of today are the prejudices of tomorrow, since the most benighted and the most deplorable prejudices have had their moment of novelty when fashion lent them its fragile grace.

The world was not created once and for all time for each of us individually. There are added to it in the course of our life things of which we have never had any suspicion.