Marcel Proust
All our final decisions are made in a state of mind that is not going to last.
Those whose suffering is due to love are, as we say of certain invalids, their own physicians.
What a profound significance small things assume when the woman we love conceals them from us.
Like everybody who is not in love, he thought one chose the person to be loved after endless deliberations and on the basis of particular qualities or advantages.
Do not wait for life. Do not long for it. Be aware, always and at every moment, that the miracle is in the here and now.Collection: Long
My destination is no longer a place, rather a new way of seeing.Collection: Way
Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.Collection: Memories
When you work to please others you can't succeed, but the things you do to satisfy yourself stand a chance of catching someone's interest.Collection: Succeed
One must never miss an opportunity of quoting things by others which are always more interesting than those one thinks up oneself.Collection: Thinking
Instead of seeking new landscapes, develop new eyes.Collection: Wise
Always try to keep a patch of sky above your life.Collection: Sky
The bonds between ourselves and another person exists only in our minds. Memory as it grows fainter loosens them, and notwithstanding the illusion by which we want to be duped and which, out of love, friendship, politeness, deference, duty, we dupe other people, we exist alone. Man is the creature who cannot escape from himself, who knows other people only in himself, and when he asserts the contrary, he is lying.Collection: Memories
Desire makes everything blossom; possession makes everything wither and fade.Collection: Desire
We love only what we do not wholly possess.Collection: French Love
We are at times too ready to believe that the present is the only possible state of things.Collection: Believe
Only by art can we get outside ourselves, instead of seeing only one world, our own, we see it under multiple forms.Collection: Art
The creation of the world did not occur at the beginning of time, it occurs every day.Collection: World
The heart does not lie.Collection: Lying
If we are to make reality endurable, we must all nourish a fantasy or two.Collection: Reality
A picture's beauty does not depend on the things portrayed in it.Collection: Doe
An hour is not merely an hour, it is a vase full of scents and sounds and projects and climates.Collection: Sound
Even though our lives wander, our memories remain in one place.Collection: Memories
We think and name in one world, we live and feel in another.Collection: Art
We live not alone but chained to a creature of a different kingdom: our body.Collection: Different
We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world.Collection: Wisdom
Reading is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.Collection: Communication
You can't learn the truth about a man's intentions by asking him.Collection: Men
Love is a striking example of how little reality means to us.Collection: Mean
Nine tenths of the ills from which intelligent people suffer spring from their intellect.Collection: Spring
Sometimes in this life, under the stress of an exceptional emotion, people do say what they think.Collection: Honesty
Our intellect is not the most subtle, the most powerful, the most appropriate, instrument for revealing the truth. It is life that, little by little, example by example, permits us to see that what is most important to our heart, or to our mind, is learned not by reasoning but through other agencies. Then it is that the intellect, observing their superiority, abdicates its control to them upon reasoned grounds and agrees to become their collaborator and lackey.Collection: Powerful
Let us be grateful to people who make us happy.Collection: Thank You
Through art alone are we able to emerge from ourselves, to know what another person sees of a universe which is not the same as our own and of which, without art, the landscapes would remain as unknown to us as those that may exist on the moon.Collection: Art
Truth is a point of view about things.Collection: Truth
Just as those who practice the same profession recognize each other instinctively, so do those who practice the same vice.Collection: Practice
The memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment.Collection: Memories
We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full.Collection: Grieving
What barrier is so insurmountable as silence?Collection: Silence
Things don't change, but by and by our wishes change.Collection: Friendship
It comes so soon, the moment when there is nothing left to wait for.Collection: Waiting
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.Collection: Powerful
It is often hard to bear the tears that we ourselves have caused.Collection: Inspirational
The inertia of the mind urges it to slide down the easy slope of imagination, rather than to climb the steep slope of introspection.Collection: Imagination
Le style, pour l'e crivain aussi bien que pour le peintre, est une question non de technique mais de vision. For the writer as well as for the painter, style is not a question of technique, but of vision.Collection: Style
A doctor who doesn't say too many foolish things is a patient half-cured.Collection: Science
Our shadows, now parallel, now close together and joined, traced an exquisite pattern at our feet.Collection: Feet
...that melancholy which we feel when we cease to obey orders which, from one day to another, keep the future hidden, and realise that we have at last begun to live in real earnest, as a grown-up person, the life, the only life that any of us has at his disposal.Collection: Real
No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me.Collection: Liquid