Quotes from Marcel Proust

Illness is the most heeded of doctors: to goodness and wisdom we only make promises; pain we obey.

We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it in full.

The mistakes made by doctors are innumerable. They err habitually on the side of optimism as to treatment, of pessimism as to the outcome.

Only through art can we get outside of ourselves and know another's view of the universe which is not the same as ours and see landscapes which would otherwise have remained unknown to us like the landscapes of the moon. Thanks to art, instead of seeing a single world, our own, we see it multiply until we have before us as many worlds as there are original artists.

All the great things we know have come to us from neurotics. It is they and only they who have founded religions and created great works of art.

Things don't change, but by and by our wishes change.

All the mind's activity is easy if it is not subjected to reality.

It is seldom indeed that one parts on good terms, because if one were on good terms one would not part.

Once I had recognized the taste of the crumb of madeleine soaked in her decoction of lime flowers which my aunt used to give me… immediately the old gray house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like the scenery of a theater.

The time at our disposal each day is elastic the passions we feel dilate it, those that inspire us shrink it, and habit fills it.

Three-quarters of the sicknesses of intelligent people come from their intelligence. They need at least a doctor who can understand this sickness.

Like everybody who is not in love, he imagined that one chose the person whom one loved after endless deliberations and on the strength of various qualities and advantages.

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

Habit is a second nature which prevents us from knowing the first, of which it has neither the cruelties nor the enchantments.

Not only does one not retain all at once the truly rare works, but even within such works it is the least precious parts that one perceives first. Less deceptive than life, these great masterpieces do not give us their best at the beginning.

A book is the product of a different self from the self we manifest in our habits, in our social life, in our vices.

Let us leave pretty women to men devoid of imagination.

There is not a woman in the world the possession of whom is as precious as that of the truths which she reveals to us by causing us to suffer.

We say that the hour of death cannot be forecast, but when we say this we imagine that hour as placed in an obscure and distant future. It never occurs to us that it has any connection with the day already begun or that death could arrive this same afternoon, this afternoon which is so certain and which has every hour filled in advance.

On no days of our childhood did we live so fully perhaps as those we thought we had left behind without living them, those that we spent with a favorite book.

A cathedral, a wave of storm, a dancer's leap, never turn out to be as high as we had hoped.

A catherdral, a wave of storm, a dancer's leap, never turn out to be as high as we had hoped.

A woman one loves rarely suffices for all our needs, so we deceive her with another whom we do not love.

Everything great that we know has come from neurotics never will the world be aware of how much it owes to them, nor above all what they have suffered in order to bestow their gifts on it.