Quotes from Marcel Proust

Yo no era más que el instrumento de unos hábitos de no trabajar.

Jean would be conscious of a curious feeling that he was living simultaneously in the immediate presence of a particular day and in other similar days of long ago.

Talvez o nada é que seja a verdade e todo o nosso sonho não exista, mas sentimos então que essas frases musicais, essas noções que existem em função do sonho, não hão de ser nada tampouco. Pereceremos, mas temos como reféns essas divinas cativas que seguirão a nossa sorte. E a morte com elas tem alguma coisa de menos amargo, de menos inglório, de menos provável, talvez.

blows and shouts being indeed no more than expressions of the confused ideas which exhilarated me, and which, not being developed to the point at which they might rest exposed to the light of day, rather than submit to a slow and difficult course of elucidation, found it easier and more pleasant to drift into an immediate outlet.

perhaps indeed there exists but a single intelligence of which everyone is a co-tenant, an intelligence towards which each of us from out of his own separate body turns his eyes, as int a theatre where, if everyone has his own separate seat, there is on the other hand but a single stage.

To make [reading] into a discipline is to give too large a role to what is only an incitement. Reading is on the threshold of a spiritual life. It can introduce us to it; it does not constitute it.

Which was for me the true friend, Mme. de Montmorency, so glad always to annoy me and always so ready to oblige, or Mme. de Guermantes, distressed by the slightest offence that might have been given me and incapable of the slightest effort to be of use to me?

Self-centeredness thus making each man a king, enabling him to see the ordered ranks of the universe beneath him,

It is the tragedy of other people that they are merely showcases for the very perishable collections of one's own mind.

No hay nadie, por muy virtuoso que sea, que por causa de la complejidad de las circunstancias, no pueda llegar algún día a vivir en familiaridad con el vicio que más rigurosamente condena.

Não há nada como o desejo para impedir que as coisas que se dizem possuam qualquer semelhança com o que se tem no pensamento.

Robert, I'm surprised that a man of your intelligence should fail to understand that one doesn't discuss the things that will give one's friends pleasure; one does them.

as of discussing the nature of love with her novelists and philosophers. "Love?" she had once replied to a pushing lady who had asked her: "What are your views on love?"—"Love? I make it, constantly, but I never talk about it.

His [Morel's] nature was really like a sheet of paper that has been folded so often in every direction that it is impossible to straighten it out.

an inverse operation multiplies to such a degree what concerns our welfare and divides by such a formidable figure what does not concern it, that the death of millions of unknown people hardly affects us more unpleasantly than a draught.

it is that the bulk of what appear to be the emotional renderings of our inmost sensations do no more than relieve us of the burden of those sensations by allowing them to escape from us in an indistinct form which does not teach us how it should be interpreted.

je cherche encore mon chemin, je tourne une rue… mais… c'est dans mon cœur…

Inasmuch as a great part of what doctors know is taught them by the sick, they are easily led to believe that this knowledge which patients exhibit is common to them all, and they fondly imagine that they can impress the patient of the moment with some remark picked up at a previous bedside.

I looked at her, at first with the sort of gaze that is not merely the messenger of the eyes, but a window at which all the senses lean out, anxious and petrified, a gaze that would like to touch the body it is looking at, capture it, take it away and the soul along with it;

Pode-se ter inclinação por uma pessoa. Mas para desencadear essa tristeza, esse sentimento do irreparável, essas angústias, que preparam o amor, é preciso - e talvez isso e não a pessoa amada seja o ansiado objeto da paixão - o risco de uma impossibilidade.

But we do not like to show off to them relations who have remained what we have tried hard to cease from being.

Les levers de soleil sont un accompagnement des longs voyages en chemin de fer, comme les œufs durs, les journaux illustrés, les jeux de cartes, les rivières où des barques s'évertuent sans avancer.

To know a thing does not enable us, always, to prevent its happening, but after all the things that we know we do hold, if not in our hands, at any rate in our minds, where we can dispose of them as we choose, which gives us the illusion of a sort of power to control them

jealousy belonging to that family of unhealthy doubts far more easily removed by the vigor of an affirmation than by its plausibility.