Quotes from Marcel Proust

O]ur 'inferiors,' who love us...take pleasure in wounding us in our self-esteem.

Nothing so tempts us to approach another person as what is keeping us apart; and what barrier is so insurmountable as silence? It has been said also that silence is torture, capable of goading to madness the man who is condemned to it in a prison cell. But what an even greater torture than that of having to keep silence it is to have to endure the silence of the person one loves!

Humanity is a very old institution. Heredity, cross-breeding have given an irresistible force to bad habits, to vicious reflexes. One person sneezes and gasps because he is passing a rosebush, another breaks out in an eruption at the smell of wet paint, has frequent attacks of colic if he has to start on a journey, and grandchildren of thieves who are themselves millionaires and generous cannot resist the temptation to rob you of fifty francs.

But what we call experience is only the revelation to our own eyes of one of our own character traits, which recurs naturally, and recurs all the more powerfully if we have already on some previous occasion brought it up into the clear light of consciousness, so that the spontaneous reaction which had guided us the first time becomes reinforced by all the suggestions of memory.

C'est peut-être de la même manière qu'une sorte de bouture prélevée sur un être, et greffée au cœur d'un autre, continue à y poursuivre sa vie, même quand l'être d'où elle avait été détachée a péri.

And thus for the first time my unhappiness was regarded no longer as a punishable offence but as an involuntary ailment which had been officially recognised, a nervous condition for which I was in no way responsible.

Benim nazar?mda bir hiç oldu?unu zannetti?im ?ey, demek ki asl?nda bütün hayat?m, her ?eyimdi. ?nsan kendini ne kadar az tan?yor!

The things one tries hardest to avoid are what one finds one cannot escape,

Romanistas priver?ia mus per vien? valand? išgyventi vis? galim? džiaugsm? ir sielvart? audr?, kai tikrov?je praeit? met? metai, kol patirtume kai kuriuos iš j?, o stipriausieji mums taip ir neatsiskleist? niekados, nes randasi jie iš l?to ir mes negalime to suvokti.

Com os prazeres, dá-se o mesmo que com as fotografias. O que apanhamos na presença da criatura amada não passa de um negativo; revelamo-lo mais tarde, uma vez em casa, quando encontramos à nossa disposição essa câmara escura interior cuja entrada é proibida enquanto há gente à vista.

O que chamamos nossa conduta permanece ignorado de nosso mais próximo vizinho; o que esquecemos haver dito, ou que até nunca dissemos, vai provocar hilaridade até num outro planeta, e a imagem que os outros formam de nossos gestos e atitudes tampouco se parece com a que nós próprios formamos, como um desenho, um decalque malfeito, e onde ora a um traço negro corresponde um espaço vazio, e a um branco, um contorno inexplicável.

he arrived; and on hearing his ring at the door I felt myself liberated from my obsessions. I knew that, if they were stronger than I, he was stronger than they, and my attention was diverted from them and concentrated on him who would have to settle them.

Bressant's voice or of Thiron's in L'Aventurière or in the Gendre de M. Poirier.

For, medicine being a compendium of the successive and contradictory mistakes of medical practioners, 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

How paradoxical it is to seek in reality for the pictures that are stored in one's memory, which must inevitably lose the charm that comes to them from memory itself and from their not being apprehended by the senses. The reality that I had known no longer existed.

In matters of crime, where there is danger for the culprit, it is self-interest that dictates confessions; where the offence incurs no penalty, it is self-esteem.

For it is a charming law of nature, which manifests itself in the heart of the most complex social organisms, that we live in perfect ignorance of those we love.

Curaram-no. Mas logo que deixou de ser louco, tornou-se idiota. Há males de que não se deve buscar a cura porque só eles nos protegem contra males mais graves.

I never allow myself to be influenced either by atmospheric perturbations or by the conventional divisions of time. I would happily instate the use of the opium pipe and the Malay kris, but I know nothing about the use of those infinitely more pernicious and also insipidly bourgeois implements, the watch and the umbrella.

In so many people there are different strata which are not alike (there were in her her father's character, and her mother's); we traverse first one, then the other. But, next day, their order is reversed. And finally we do not know who is going to allot the parts, to whom we are to appeal for a hearing. Gilberte was like one of those countries with which we dare not form an alliance because of their too frequent changes of government.

Matote, gyvenime, mano berniuk, ateina toksai laikas, <...>, kai pavargusios akys nebepakelia kitos šviesos tik t?, kuri? graži naktis, kaip šiandien, sukuria ir skleidžia kartu su tamsa, kai ausys nebegali klausytis kitos muzikos, o tik m?nesienos, grojan?ios tylos fleita.

Reality is the cleverest of our enemies. It directs its attacks at those points in our heart where we were not expecting them, and where we had prepared no defense. Had Albertine been lying to her aunt then, when she said every day that she was going to the Buttes-Chaumont, or to me when she said that she had never been there?

It is only with the passions of others that we are ever really familiar, and that we come to find out about our own can be no more than what other people have shewn us.

An artist has no need to express his thought directly in a work for the work to reflect its quality; it has even been said that the highest praise of God is to be found in the denial of Him by the atheist, who considers creation to be perfect enough to dispense with a Creator.