Marcel Proust Mind Quotations

It is always during a passing state of mind that we make lasting resolutions.

It is always thus, impelled by a state of mind which is destined not to last, that we make our irrevocable decisions

There can be no piece of mind in love, since the advantage one has secured is never anything but a fresh starting-point for future desires

There's nothing like desire to prevent the things one says from having any resemblance to the things in one's mind.

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

The reason why a work of genius is not easily admired from the first is that the man who has created it is extraordinary, that few other men resemble him. It is his work itself that, by fertilising the rare minds capable of understanding it, will make them increase and multiply.

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.

Our virtues themselves are not free and floating qualities over which we retain a permanent control and power of disposal; they come to be so closely linked in our minds with the actions in conjunction with which we have made it our duty to exercise them that if we come to engage in an activity of a different kind, it catches us off guard and without the slightest awareness that it might involve the application of those same virtues.

We see things but we don't see them, like things that slid through the mind, one flowing into another.

We pack the physical outline of the creature we see with all the ideas we have already formed about him, and in the complete picture of him we compose in our minds those ideas have certainly the principal place.

Masterpieces are no more than the shipwrecked flotsam of great minds.

Having a body is in itself the greatest threat to the mind... The body encloses the mind in a fortress; before long the mind is besieged on all sides, and in the end the mind has to give itself up.

It is always thus, impelled by a state of mind which is destined not to last, we make our irrevocable decisions

What an abyss of uncertainty, whenever the mind feels overtaken by itself; when it, the seeker, is at the same time the dark region through which it must go seeking and where all its equipment will avail it nothing. Seek? More than that: create. It is face to face with something which does not yet exist, which it alone can make actual, which it alone can bring into the light of day.

It is the tragedy of other people that they are to us merely showcases for the very perishable collections of our own mind.

I believe that all true art is classic, but the dictates of the mind rarely permit of its being recognized as such when it first appears.

The inertia of the mind urges it to slide down the easy slope of imagination, rather than to climb the steep slope of introspection.

There can be no peace of mind in love, since the advantage one has secured is never anything but a fresh starting-point for future desires.

The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it....