Quotes from Marcel Proust

E depois, como tinha sobre a nobreza e a natureza dos nomes com que se formam os títulos as noções muito vagas que são as de muita gente que não é ascensorista , tanto mais verossímil lhe parecera o nome de Camembert porque, sendo esse queijo universalmente conhecido, não era de espantar que se tirasse um marquesado de tão glorioso renome, a menos que não fosse o marquesado que emprestara sua celebridade ao queijo.

But the absolute control over his facial muscles to which M. de Norpois had attained allowed him to listen without seeming to hear a word.

Dinner parties bore us because our imagination is absent, and reading interests us because it is keeping us company. But the people in question are the same. We would have liked to know Mme de Pompadour, who was so stalwart a patron of the arts, and we would have been as bored in her company as we are among all the modern Egerias108 at whose houses we cannot bring ourselves to pay a second call, so mediocre is their company.

que parecía el juguete inerte y mecánico de la felicidad.

Illness is the doctor to whom we pay most heed: to kindness, to knowledge we make promises only; pain we obey.

He had, indeed, one of the advantages which men who have lived and moved in society enjoy over those, however intelligent, who have not, namely that they no longer see it transfigured by the longing or repulsion which it inspires, but regard it as of no importance.

which there was already installed a lady with a massive face, old and ugly, with a masculine expression, very much in her Sunday best, who was reading the Revue des Deux Mondes. Notwithstanding her commonness, she was eclectic in her tastes, and I found amusement in asking myself to what social category she could belong; I at once concluded that she must be the manager of some large brothel, a procuress on holiday. Her face, her manner, proclaimed the fact aloud.

To think that I have wasted years of my life, that I have longed for death, that the greatest love that I have ever known has been for a woman who did not please me, who was not in my style!

Thus the face of things in life changes, the centre of empires, the register of fortunes, the chart of positions, all that seemed final, are perpetually remoulded and during his life-time a man can witness the completest changes just where those seemed to him least possible

Which was for me the true friend—Mme de Montmorency, so happy to ruffle my feelings and always so willing to oblige, or Mme de Guermantes, distressed at the least offense toward me and incapable of the least effort to be helpful?

one can grow so well accustomed as to smile at them, to take the tormentor's side with a. happy determination which deludes one into the belief that it is not, really, tormenting;

Things seemed frozen in silent attention so as not to disturb the moonlight which, duplicating and distancing each thing by extending its shadow before it, denser and more concrete than itself, had at once thinned and enlarged the landscape like a map that had been folded and was now opened out.

For what we suppose to be our love, our jealousy are, neither of them, single, continuous and individual passions. They are composed of an infinity of successive loves, of different jealousies, each of which is ephemeral, although by their uninterrupted multitude they give us the impression of continuity, the illusion of unity.

And with the intermittent coarseness that reappeared in him as soon as he was no longer unhappy and the level of his morality dropped accordingly, he exclaimed to himself: "To think that I wasted years of my life, that I wanted to die, that I felt my deepest love, for a woman who did not appeal to me, who was not my type!

all those individuals who are better at analyzing than at valuing themselves.

it is sometimes enough to make us love a woman that she looks on us with contempt,

He was one of that class of men who, apart from a scientific career in which they may well have proved brilliantly successful, have acquired an entirely different kind of culture, literary or artistic, of which they make no use in the specialised work of their profession, but by which their conversation profits.

Just as it is not the wish to be famous, but a habit of hard work, that may make a creative artist of us, so it is not the joy we take in the present, but sober reflection on the past, that may enable us to safeguard the future.

That fellow Argencourt is well born but ill bred, a worse-than-second-rate diplomat, a loathsome husband and a womanizer, a double-faced stage character. He's one of those men who are incapable of understanding but perfectly capable of destroying the high things in life.

Suddenly there came a memory which I had not seen for a long time, for it had remained dissolved in the transparent, fluid expanses of my memory, until it formed into crystals.

But sometimes the future is latent in us without our knowledge, and our words which we suppose to be false forecast an imminent reality.

It is I suppose comprehensible that the letters which we receive from a person are more or less similar and combine to trace an image of the writer so different from the person whom we know as to constitute a second personality.

Invalids, weary of having to make the infrequency of their attacks depend on their own prudence, like to persuade themselves that they can do everything that they enjoy, and that does them harm, with impunity, provided that they place themselves in the hands of a higher authority who, without putting them to the least inconvenience, can and will, by uttering a word or by administering a pill, set them once again on their feet.

the shipwreck of my nervous storms.