Marcel Proust
In the sort of screen dappled with different states of mind which my consciousness would simultaneously unfold while I read, and which ranged from the aspirations hidden deepest within me to the completely exterior vision of the horizon which I had, at the bottom of the garden, before my eyes, what was first in me, innermost, the constantly moving handle that controlled the rest, was my belief in the philosophical richness and beauty of the book I was reading, and my desire to appropriate them for myself, whatever that book might be.Collection: Moving
At a certain age, we have already been struck by love; it no longer develops alone, according to its own mysteries and fateful laws while our hearts stand by startled and passive. We come to its assistanceRecognizing one of its symptoms, we recall, we bring back to life the others. Since we possess its song engraved in its totality within us, we do not need for a woman to tell us the beginning--filled with admiration inspired by beauty--to find the continuation.Collection: Song
No doubt very few people understand the purely subjective nature of the phenomenon that we call love, or how it creates, so to speak, a supplementary person, distinct from the person whom the world knows by the same name, a person most of whose constituent elements are derived from ourselves.Collection: Names
But to ask pity of our body is like discoursing in front of an octopus, for which our words can have no more meaning than the sound of the tides, and with which we should be appalled to find ourselves condemned to live.Collection: Octopus
The human plagiarism which is most difficult to avoid, for individuals... is the plagiarism of ourselves.Collection: Individual
How can we have the courage to wish to live, how can we make a movement to preserve ourselves from death, in a world where love is provoked by a lie and consists solely in the need of having our sufferings appeased by whatever being has made us suffer?Collection: Lying
We can only be faithful to what we remember, and we remember only what we have known.Collection: Faithful
Let a prize lower my position, if it causes me to be read; that I prefer immediately to all the honors.Collection: Honor
That translucent alabaster of our memories.Collection: Memories
The truth is that men can have several sorts of pleasure. The true pleasure is the one for which they abandon the other.Collection: Men
The disinterest [of my two great-aunts] in anything that had to do with high society was such that their sense of hearing ... put to rest its receptor organs and allowed them to suffer the true beginnings of atrophy.Collection: Aunt
For neither our greatest fears nor our greatest hopes are beyond the limits of our strength--we are able in the end both to dominate the first and to achieve the second.Collection: Greatest Fear
I should have been happy: I wasn’t.Collection: Should Have
There is no man ... however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived a life, the memory of which is so unpleasant to him that he would gladly expunge it. And yet he ought not entirely to regret it, because he cannot be certain that he has indeed become a wise man -- so far as it is possible for any of us to be wise -- unless he has passed through all the fatuous or unwholesome incarnations by which that ultimate stage must be preceded.Collection: Wise
We only really know what is new, what suddenly introduces to our sensibility a change of tone which strikes us, that for which habit has not yet substituted its pale fac-similes.Collection: Tone
The past not merely is not fugitive, it remains present.Collection: Past
Aristocracy is a relative thing. And there are plenty of out-of-the-way places where the son of an upholsterer is the arbiter of fashion and reigns over a court like any young Prince of Wales.Collection: Fashion
According to a charming law of nature which is evident even in the most sophisticated societies, we live in complete ignorance of whatever we love.Collection: Ignorance
May you always see a blue sky overhead, my young friend; and then, even when the time comes, as it has come for me now, when the woods are black, when night is fast falling, you will be able to console yourself, as I do, by looking up at the sky.Collection: Fall
For one cannot change, that is to say become another person, while continuing to acquiesce to the feelings of the person one no longer is.Collection: Feelings
The truth is that every morning war is declared afresh. And the men who wish to continue it are as guilty as the men who began it, more guilty perhaps, for the latter perhaps did not foresee all its horrors.Collection: Morning
The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it...Collection: Sight
But when one believes in the reality of things, making them visible by artificial means is not quite the same as feeling that they are close at hand.Collection: Believe
But,instead of what our imagination makes us suppose and which we worthless try to discover,life gives us something that we could hardly imagine.Collection: Imagination
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.Collection: Health
And indeed when we are no longer in love with women whom we meet after many years, is there not the abyss of death between them and ourselves, just as much as if they were no longer of this world, since the fact that we are no longer in love makes the people that they were or the person that we were then as good as dead?Collection: Years
Error, by force of contrast, enhances the triumph of Truth.Collection: Errors
This love of ours, in so far as it is a love for one particular creature, is not perhaps a very real thing, since, though associations of pleasant or painful musings can attach it for a time to a woman to the extent of making us believe that it has been inspired by her in a logically necessary way, if on the other hand we detach ourselves deliberately or unconsciously from those associations, this love, as though it were in fact spontaneous and sprang from ourselves alone, will revive in order to bestow itself on another woman.Collection: Love
Are not the thoughts of the dying often turned towards the practical, painful, obscure, visceral aspect, towards the "seamy side" of death which is, as it happens, the side that death actually presents to them and forces them to feel, and which far more closely resembles a crushing burden, a difficulty in breathing, a destroying thirst, than the abstract idea to which we are accustomed to give the name of Death?Collection: Crush
Only through art can we get outside of ourselves and know another's view of the universe which is not the same as ours and see landscapes which otherwise would remain unknown to us like the landscapes of the moon. Thanks to art, instead of seeing a single world, our own, we see it multiply until we have before us as many worlds as there are original artists.Collection: Art
The tiny, initial clue ... by allowing us to imagine what we do not know, stimulates a desire for knowledge.Collection: Knowledge
There's nothing like desire to prevent the things one says from having any resemblance to the things in one's mind.Collection: Mind
Every reader finds himself. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.Collection: Book
Dinner-parties bore us because our imagination is absent, and reading interests us because it is keeping us company.Collection: Reading