Quotes from Marcel Proust

People who are not in love fail to understand how an intelligent man can suffer because of a very ordinary woman. This is like being surprised that anyone should be stricken with cholera because of a creature so insignificant as the comma bacillus.

The bonds that unite another person to ourselves exist only in our mind. Memory as it grows fainter relaxes them, and notwithstanding the illusion by which we would fain be cheated and with which, out of love, friendship, politeness, deference, duty, we cheat other people, we exist alone. Man is the creature that cannot emerge from himself, that knows his fellows only in himself when he asserts the contrary, he is lying.

The charms of the passing woman are generally in direct proportion to the swiftness of her passing.

The one thing more difficult than following a regimen is not imposing it on others.

The only paradise is paradise lost.

The opinions we hold of one another, our relations with friends and kinfolk are in no sense permanent, save in appearance, but are as eternally fluid as the sea itself.

The true paradises are paradises we have lost.

The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.

Time passes, and little by little everything that we have spoken in falsehood becomes true.

We are healed from suffering only by experiencing it to the full.

We don't receive wisdom we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take us or spare us.

We must never be afraid to go too far, for success lies just beyond.

Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.

Always try to keep a patch of sky above your life.

Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.

Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself. The writer's work is only a kind of optical instrument he provides the reader so he can discern what he might never have seen in himself without this book. The reader's recognition in himself of what the book says is the proof of the book's truth.

Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.

Love is a striking example of how little reality means to us.

Let us leave pretty women to men with no imagination.

My destination is no longer a place, rather a new way of seeing.

We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.

The true paradises are the paradises that we have lost.

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

It comes so soon, the moment when there is nothing left to wait for.