People have many different kinds of pleasure. The real one is that for which they will forsake
the others.
– Marcel Proust
If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less, but to dream more, to
dream all the time.
– Marcel Proust
It is often hard to bear the tears that we ourselves have caused.
– Marcel Proust
Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.
– Marcel Proust
Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who
make our souls blossom.
– Marcel Proust
Reading is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.
– Marcel Proust
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new
eyes.
– Marcel Proust
What a profound significance small things assume when the woman we love conceals them
from us.
– Marcel Proust
The time which we have at our disposal every day is elastic; the passions that we feel
expand it, those that we inspire contract it; and habit fills up what remains.
– Marcel Proust
Always try to keep a patch of sky above your life.
– Marcel Proust
For each illness that doctors cure with medicine, they provoke ten in healthy people by
inoculating them with the virus that is a thousand times more powerful than any microbe: the
idea that one is ill.
– Marcel Proust
The regularity of a habit is generally in proportion to its absurdity.
– Marcel Proust
Time, which changes people, does not alter the image we have of them.
– 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 common bacillus.
– Marcel Proust
A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left.
– Marcel Proust
Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.
– Marcel Proust
A powerful idea communicates some of its strength to him who challenges it.
– Marcel Proust
In his younger days a man dreams of possessing the heart of the woman whom he loves;
later, the feeling that he possesses the heart of a woman may be enough to make him fall in
love with her.
– Marcel Proust
A doctor who doesn’t say too many foolish things is a patient half-cured.
– Marcel Proust
Love is a striking example of how little reality means to us.
– Marcel Proust
The charms of the passing woman are generally in direct proportion to the swiftness of her
passing.
– Marcel Proust
Love is space and time made sensitive to the heart.
– Marcel Proust
There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we believe we left
without having lived them, those we spent with a favorite book.
– Marcel Proust
It comes so soon, the moment when there is nothing left to wait for.
– Marcel Proust
Impelled by a state of mind which is destined not to last, we make our irrevocable decisions.
– Marcel Proust
A woman is of greater service to our life if she is in it, instead of being an element of
happiness, an instrument of sorrow, and 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.
– Marcel Proust
We don’t receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can
take for us or spare us.
– Marcel Proust
People wish to learn to swim and at the same time to keep one foot on the ground.
– Marcel Proust
Often it is just lack of imagination that keeps a man from suffering very much.
– Marcel Proust
The paradoxes of today are the prejudices of tomorrow, since the most benighted and the
most deplorable prejudices have had their moment of novelty when fashion lent them its
fragile grace.
– Marcel Proust