Marcel Proust Quotations | Page 5

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

Death is in truth an illness from which we recover

In love, happiness is an abnormal state.

There is no idea that does not carry in itself a possible refutation, no word that does not imply its opposite.

We believe we can change things according to our wishes because that's the only happy solution we can see. We don't think of what usually happens and what is also a happy solution; things don't change, but by and by our wishes change.

In summoning even the wisest of physicians to our aid, it is probably that he is relying upon a scientific "truth", the error of which will become obvious in just a few years' time.

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.

Sometimes in the afternoon sky the moon would pass white as a cloud, furtive, lusterless, like an actress who does not have to perform yet and who, from the audience, in street clothes, watches the other actors for a moment, making herself inconspicuous, not wanting anyone to pay attention to her.

I had come in time to learn that it was a mistake to smile a friendly smile when somebody made a fool of me.

The facts of life do not penetrate to the sphere in which our beliefs are cherished; they did not engender those beliefs, and they are powerless to destroy them.

The human plagiarism which is most difficult to avoid, for individuals... is the plagiarism of ourselves.

Le veritable voyage de decouverte ne consiste pas a chercher de nouveaux paysages, mais a avoir de nouveaux yeux. (The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.)

Everybody calls "clear" those ideas which have the same degree of confusion as his own.

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

Which of course is followed by: For those who have Awareness, a hint is quite enough. For the multitudes of heedless mere knowledge is useless. Haji Bektash Veli We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.

Memory nourishes the heart, and grief abates.

I understood that all the material of a literary work was in my past life, I understood that I had acquired it in the midst of frivolous amusements, in idleness, in tenderness and in pain, stored up by me without my divining its destination or even its survival, as the seed has in reserve all the ingredients which will nourish the plant.

Medicine being a compendium of the successive and contradictory mistakes of medical practitioners, when we summon the wisest of them to our aid, the chances are that we may be relying on a scientific truth the error of which will be recognized in a few years time.

I drank a second mouthful in which I find nothing more than in the first, then a third which gives me rather less than the second. It is time to stop; the potion is losing its magic.

Indeed, among the lesser auxiliaries to success in love, an absence, the declining of an invitation to dinner, an unintentional, unconscious harshness are of more service than all the cosmetics and fine clothes in the world.

The loss of a sense adds as much beauty to the world as its acquisition.

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.

A man of letters, merely by reading a phrase, can estimate exactly the literary merit of its author.

Each reader reads only what is already within himself. The book is only a sort of optical instrument which the writer offers to the reader to enable the latter to discover in himself what he would not have found but for the aid of the book.

A certain similarity exists, although the type evolves, between all the women we love, a similarity that is due to the fixity of our own temperament, which it is that chooses them, eliminating all those who would not be at once our opposite and our complement, fitted that is to say to gratify our senses and to wring our heart.

As soon as he ceased to be mad he became merely stupid. There are maladies we must not seek to cure because they alone protect us from others that are more serious.

We were resigned to suffering, thinking that we loved outside ourselves, and we perceive that our love is a function of our sorrow, that our love perhaps is our sorrow..

The stellar universe is not so difficult to understand as the real actions of other people, especially of the people with whom we are in love.

Desire makes everything blossom

It is desire that engenders belief; if we fail as a rule to take this into account, it is because most of the desires that create beliefs end only with out own life.

People don't know when they are happy. They're never so unhappy as they think they are.

Neurosis has an absolute genius for malingering. There is no illness which it cannot counterfeit perfectly. If it is capable of deceiving the doctor, how should it fail to deceive the patient

A doctor who doesn't say too many foolish things is a patient half-cured.

The most familiar precepts are not always the truest.

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

A person does not...stand motionless and clear before our eyes with his merits, his defects, his plans, his intentions with regard to ourself exposed on his surface...but is a shadow which we can never succeed in penetrating...a shadow behind which we can alternately imagine, with equal justification, that there burns the flame of hatred and of love.

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

We feel in one world, we think and name in another. Between the two we can set up a system of references, but we cannot fill in the gap.

The features of our face are hardly more than gestures which force of habit made permanent. Nature, like the destruction of Pompeii, like the metamorphosis of a nymph into a tree, has arrested us in an accustomed movement.

No days, perhaps, of all our childhood are ever so fully lived as those that we had regarded as not being lived at all: days spent wholly with a favourite book. Everything that seemed to fill them full for others we pushed aside, because it stood between us and the pleasures of the Gods.

It is up to my spirit to find the truth. But how? Grave uncertainty, each time the spirit feels beyond its own comprehension; whenit, the explorer, is altogether to obscure land that it must search and where all its baggage is of no use. To search? That is not all: to create.

Wars are fought for the benefit of oligarchs, triumphs bought with the blood of peons.

The sensitiveness claimed by neurotic is matched by their egotism: they cannot abide the flaunting by others of the sufferings to which they pay an even increasing amount of attention in themselves.

Habit! that skillful but slow arranger, which starts out by letting our spirit suffer for weeks in a temporary state, but that thespirit is after all happy to discover, for without habit and reduced to its own resources, the spirit would be unable to make any lodgings seem habitable.

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