Quotes by Proust, Marcel

"We say that the hour of death cannot be forecast, but when we say this we imagine that hour as placed in an obscure and distant future. It never occurs to us that it has any connection with the day already begun or that death could arrive this same afternoon, this afternoon which is so certain and which has every hour filled in advance."

Proust, Marcel on death
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"Impelled by a state of mind which is destined not to last, we make our irrevocable decisions"

Proust, Marcel on decisions
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"All our final decisions are made in a state of mind that is not going to last."

Proust, Marcel on decisions   

"We do not succeed in changing things according to our desire, but gradually our desire changes."

Proust, Marcel on desire
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"There's nothing like desire to prevent the things one says from having any resemblance to the things in one's mind."

Proust, Marcel on desire   

"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."

Proust, Marcel on doctors   

"If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time."

Proust, Marcel on dream
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"A cathedral, a wave of storm, a dancer's leap, never turn out to be as high as we had hoped."

Proust, Marcel on expectation   

"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."

Proust, Marcel on faces   

"The regularity of a habit is generally in proportion to its absurdity."

Proust, Marcel on habit
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"Let us be grateful to people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom."

Proust, Marcel on happiness
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"Happiness serves hardly any other purpose than to make unhappiness possible."

Proust, Marcel on happiness   

"A powerful idea communicates some of its strength to him who challenges it."

Proust, Marcel on ideas
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"Illness is the doctor to whom we pay most heed; to kindness, to knowledge we make promise only; pain we obey."

Proust, Marcel on illness   

"Often it is just lack of imagination that keeps a man from suffering very much."

Proust, Marcel on imagination   

"A woman one loves rarely suffices for all our needs, so we deceive her with another whom we do not love."

Proust, Marcel on infidelity   

"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."

Proust, Marcel on intelligence and intellectuals   

"Time passes, and little by little everything that we have spoken in falsehood becomes true."

Proust, Marcel on lies and lying   

"Lies are essential to humanity. They are perhaps as important as the pursuit of pleasure and moreover are dictated by that pursuit."

Proust, Marcel on lies and lying   

"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 comma bacillus."

Proust, Marcel on love
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"In a separation it is the one who is not really in loved who says the more tender things."

Proust, Marcel on love
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"We are able to find everything in our memory, which is like a dispensary or chemical laboratory in which chance steers our hand sometimes to a soothing drug and sometimes to a dangerous poison."

Proust, Marcel on memory   

"That translucent alabaster of our memories."

Proust, Marcel on memory   

"Our memory is like a shop in the window of which is exposed now one, now another photograph of the same person. And as a rule the most recent exhibit remains for some time the only one to be seen."

Proust, Marcel on memory   

"Let us leave pretty women to men devoid of imagination."

Proust, Marcel on women   

"We become moral when we are unhappy."

Proust, Marcel on morality
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"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."

Proust, Marcel on neurosis   

"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?"

Proust, Marcel on neurosis
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"Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and composed our masterpieces."

Proust, Marcel on neurosis
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"Everything great that we know has come from neurotics never will the world be aware of how much it owes to them, nor above all what they have suffered in order to bestow their gifts on it."

Proust, Marcel on neurosis   

"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."

Proust, Marcel on paradox   

"The moments of the past do not remain still; they retain in our memory the motion which drew them towards the future, towards a future which has itself become the past, and draw us on in their train."

Proust, Marcel on past
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"The human plagiarism which is most difficult to avoid, for individuals... is the plagiarism of ourselves."

Proust, Marcel on plagiarism   

"People have many different kinds of pleasure. The real one is that for which they will forsake the others."

Proust, Marcel on pleasure   

"A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left."

Proust, Marcel on art   

"There is no man, however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived in a way the consciousness of which is so unpleasant to him in later life that he would gladly, if he could, expunge it from his memory."

Proust, Marcel on regret
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"The bonds that unite another person to our self exist only in our mind."

Proust, Marcel on relationship   

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

Proust, Marcel on resolution   

"People wish to learn to swim and at the same time to keep one foot on the ground."

Proust, Marcel on risk   

"We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it in full."

Proust, Marcel on suffering
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