Quotes from Marcel Proust

If the conversations of two people bound by a tie of intimacy are full of lies, these crop up no less spontaneously in the conversations that a third person holds with a lover about the person with whom the latter is in love, whatever the sex of that person.

As it had been with Dreyfusism, so it was with the marriage of Saint-Loup and Odette's daughter, a marriage people protested against at first. Now that people met everyone they knew at the Saint-Loups', Gilberte might have had the morals of Odette herself, people would have gone there just the same and would have agreed with Gilberte in condemning undigested moral novelties like a dowager-duchess.

For while an event for which we are longing never happens quite in the way we have been expecting, failing the advantages on which we supposed that we might count, others present themselves for which we never hoped, and make up for our disappointment; and we have been so dreading the worst that in the end we are inclined to feel that, taking one thing with another, chance has, on the whole, been rather kind to us.

Then it would begin to seem unintelligible, as the thoughts of a former existence must be to a reincarnate spirit; the subject of my book would separate itself from me, leaving me free to choose whether I would form part of it or no; and at the same time my sight would return and I would be astonished to find myself in a state of darkness, pleasant and restful enough for the eyes, and even more, perhaps, for my mind, to which it appeared incomprehensible

there are few that can really be happy when we are dealing with a sentiment of such a kind that any satisfaction we can give it does no more, as a rule, than dislodge some pain. And yet sometimes a respite is granted us, and we have for a little while the illusion of being healed.

Noblemen are almost the only people who can teach you as much as peasants; their conversation is adorned with everything that concerns the land, dwellings as people used to live in them in the past, old customs, everything about which the moneyed world is profoundly ignorant.

?nsan mutsuz oldu?u andan itibaren ahlakç? olur.

Habit! that skilful but slow-moving arranger who begins by letting our minds suffer for weeks on end in temporary quarters, but whom our minds are none the less only too happy to discover at last, for without it, reduced to their own devices, they would be powerless to make any room seem habitable.

For mental uncertainty is even more of an obstacle to clear visual perception than a physical defect of the eye would be.

As on a plant whose flowers open at different seasons, I had seen, expressed in the form of old ladies, on this Balbec shore, those shrivelled seed-pods, those flabby tubers which my friends would one day be. But what matter? For the moment it was their flowering-time

Since railways came into existence, the necessity of not missing the train has taught us to take account of minutes whereas among the ancient Romans, who not only had a more cursory science of astronomy but led less hurried lives, the notion not of minutes but even of fixed hours barely existed.

The immobility of that thin face, like that of a sheet of paper subjected to the colossal pressure of two atmospheres, seemed to me to be held in balance by two infinities which converged on her without meeting, for she held them apart. And indeed, as we looked at her, Robert and I, neither of us saw her from the same side of the mystery.

Nos curaríamos para siempre de todo sentimentalismo si intentásemos, al pensar en la persona amada, tratar de ser el que seremos cuando hayamos dejado de amarla".

not for a triumph of dramatic artistry but for a manifestation of life;

You have a soul in you of rare quality, an artist's nature; never let it starve for lack of what it needs.

A real human being, however profoundly we sympathize with him, is in large part perceived by our senses, that is to say, remains opaque to us, presents a dead weight which our sensibility cannot lift.

No doubt very few people understand the purely subjective nature of the phenomenon that we call love, or how it creates, so to speak, a fresh, a third, a supplementary person, distinct from the person whom the world knows by the same name, a person most of whose constituent elements are derived from ourself, the lover. And so there are very few who can regard as natural the enormous proportions that a creature comes to assume in our eyes who is not the same as the creature that they see.

just as Eve was created from a rib of Adam, so a woman would come into existence while I was sleeping, conceived from some strain in the position of my limbs. Formed

Kadar ?lovek ljubi, je ljubezen prevelika, da bi jo mogel obdržati vso v sebi samem; tedaj ljubezen izžareva proti ljubljenemu bitju, naleti v njem na ploskev, ki jo prestreže in odbije proti izhodiš?u, in ta odboj lastnih ?ustev imamo za ljubezen onega drugega bitja ter smo od nje vsi o?arani, saj ne spoznamo, da izvira iz nas.

The words that passed between the girls of the little band and myself were not of any interest; they were, moreover, but few, broken by long spells of silence on my part. All of which did not prevent me from finding, in listening to them when the spoke to me, as much pleasure as in gazing at them, in discovering in the voice of each one of them a brightly colored picture. It was with ecstasy that I caught their pipings.

All men with similar ideas are alike.

The unknown element in the lives of other people is like that of nature, which each fresh scientific discovery merely reduces but does not abolish.

A grande modificação que provoca em nós o despertar consiste menos em introduzir-nos na vida clara da consciência que em fazer-nos perder a lembrança da luz um pouco mais tamisada em que repousava a nossa inteligência, como no fundo opalino das águas.

tout cela qui prend forme et solidité, est sorti, ville et jardins, de ma tasse de thé.