110+ Marcel Proust Quotes On Friendship, Death And Time

Marcel Proust was a French author best known for his seven-volume novel sequence, In Search of Lost Time. He was an influential modernist writer, whose work explored the themes of memory, time, and identity. His novel sequence is considered to be one of the most important works of the 20th century. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Marcel Proust on friendship, love, death.

Top 10 Marcel Proust Quotes

1. The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.
2. Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.
3. We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.
4. 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.
5. Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.
6. One must never miss an opportunity of quoting things by others which are always more interesting than those one thinks up oneself.
7. Sometimes in this life, under the stress of an exceptional emotion, people do say what they think.
8. My destination is no longer a place, rather a new way of seeing.
9. If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time.
10. Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and composed our masterpieces.

Marcel Proust Short Quotes

• A change in the weather is sufficient to recreate the world and ourselves.
• Even though our lives wander, our memories remain in one place.
• We do not succeed in changing things according to our desire, but gradually our desire changes.
• Instead of seeking new landscapes, develop new eyes.
• An hour is not merely an hour, it is a vase full of scents and sounds and projects and climates.
• It is often hard to bear the tears that we ourselves have caused.
• We become moral when we are unhappy.
• If only for the sake of elegance, I try to remain morally pure.
• The only paradise is paradise lost.
• We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it in full.

Marcel Proust Quotes About Love

In a separation it is the one who is not really in loved who says the more tender things. — Marcel Proust

In reality, in love there is a permanent suffering which joy neutralizes, renders virtual delays, but which can at any moment become what it would have become long earlier if one had not obtained what one wanted -- atrocious. — Marcel Proust

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. — Marcel Proust

Love is space and time measured by the heart. — Marcel Proust

Love...., ever unsatisfied, lives always in the moment that is about to come. — Marcel Proust

In his younger days a man dreams of possessing the heart of the woman whom he loves; later, the feeling that he possesses the heart of a woman may be enough to make him fall in love with her. — Marcel Proust

Love is a reciprocal torture. — Marcel Proust

So we don't believe that life is beautiful because we don't recall it but if we get a whiff of a long-forgotten smell we are suddenly intoxicated and similarly we think we no longer love the dead because we don't remember them but if by chance we come across an old glove we burst into tears. — Marcel Proust

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

... we made much less happy by the kindness of a great writer, which strictly speaking we find only in his books, than we suffer from the hostility of a woman whom we have not chosen for her intelligence, but whom we cannot stop ourselves from loving. — Marcel Proust

Marcel Proust Quotes About Death

People do not die for us immediately, but remain bathed in a sort of aura of life which bears no relation to true immortality but through which they continue to occupy our thoughts in the same way as when they were alive. It is as though they were traveling abroad. — Marcel Proust

We shall see later on that the diversity of the forms of death that circulate invisibly is the cause of the peculiar unexpectedness of obituary notices in the newspapers. — Marcel Proust

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? — Marcel Proust

Death is in truth an illness from which we recover — Marcel Proust

Marcel Proust Quotes About Life

There is no more ridiculous custom than the one that makes you express sympathy once and for all on a given day to a person whose sorrow will endure as long as his life. Such grief, felt in such a way is always present, it is never too late to talk about it, never repetitious to mention it again. — Marcel Proust

Let us be grateful to people who make us happy. — Marcel Proust

The only true voyage of discovery, . . . would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes. — Marcel Proust

Even from the simplest, the most realistic point of view, the countries which we long for occupy, at any given moment, a far larger place in our actual life than the country in which we happen to be. — Marcel Proust

In theory one is aware that the earth revolves, but in practice one does not perceive it, the ground upon which one treads seems not to move, and one can live undisturbed. So it is with Time in one's life. — Marcel Proust

We passionately long that there may be another life in which we shall be similar to what we are here below. But we do not pause to reflect that, even without waiting for that other life, in this life, after a few years we are unfaithful to what we have been, to what we wished to remain immortally. — Marcel Proust

Our intonations contain our philosophy of life, what each of us is constantly telling himself about things. — Marcel Proust

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. — Marcel Proust

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. — Marcel Proust

Even in the most insignificant details of our daily life, none of us can be said to constitute a material whole, which is identical for everyone, and need only be turned up like a page in an account-book or the record of a will; our social personality is created by the thoughts of other people. — Marcel Proust

Marcel Proust Quotes About Time

Time, which changes people, does not alter the image we have retained of them. — Marcel Proust

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. — Marcel Proust

The creation of the world did not occur at the beginning of time, it occurs every day. — Marcel Proust

The time at our disposal each day is elastic; the passions we feel dilate it, those that inspire us shrink it, and habit fills it. — Marcel Proust

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

A sleeping man holds in a circle around him the thread of the hours, the order of years and of worlds. He consults them instinctively upon awaking and in one second reads in them the point of the earth that he occupies, the time past until his arousal; but their ranks can be mingled or broken. — Marcel Proust

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

We are at times too ready to believe that the present is the only possible state of things. — Marcel Proust

There are optical illusions in time as well as space. — Marcel Proust

There comes in all our lives a time ... when the ears can listen to no music save what the moonlight breathes through the flute of silence. — Marcel Proust

Marcel Proust Quotes About People

I was left alone there in the company of the orchids, roses and violets, which, like people waiting beside you who do not know you, preserved a silence which their individuality as living things made all the more striking, and warmed themselves in the heat of a glowing coal fire. — Marcel Proust

It is not because other people are dead that our affection for them grows faint, it is because we ourselves are dying. — Marcel Proust

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

We are ordinarily so indifferent to people that when we have invested one of them with the possibility of giving us joy, or suffering, it seems as if he must belong to some other universe, he is imbued with poetry. — Marcel Proust

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. — Marcel Proust

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

Three-quarters of the sicknesses of intelligent people come from their intelligence. They need at least a doctor who can understand this sickness. — Marcel Proust

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

Only imagination and belief can differentiate from the rest certain objects, certain people, and can create an atmosphere. — Marcel Proust

We ought at least, from prudence, never to speak of ourselves, because that is a subject on which we may be sure that other people's views are never in accordance with our own. — Marcel Proust

Marcel Proust Quotes About Mind

Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind. — Marcel Proust

The bonds that unite another person to our self exist only in our mind. — Marcel Proust

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. — Marcel Proust

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. — Marcel Proust

Marcel Proust Quotes About Illness

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. — Marcel Proust

It is in moments of illness that we are compelled to recognize that we live not alone but chained to a creature of a different kingdom, whole worlds apart, who has no knowledge of us and by whom it is impossible to make ourselves understood: our body. — Marcel Proust

Illness is the most heeded of doctors: to goodness and wisdom we only make promises; pain we obey. — Marcel Proust

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

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? — Marcel Proust

Nine tenths of the ills from which intelligent people suffer spring from their intellect. — Marcel Proust

Marcel Proust Famous Quotes And Sayings

Time, which changes people, does not alter the image we have retained of them. — Marcel Proust

There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book. — Marcel Proust

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. — Marcel Proust

There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we believe we left without having lived them, those we spent with a favorite book. — Marcel Proust

The bonds that unite another person to our self exist only in our mind. — Marcel Proust

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. — Marcel Proust

Everything we think of as great has come to us from neurotics. It is they and they alone who found religions and create great works of art. The world will never realize how much it owes to them, and what they have suffered in order to bestow their gifts on it. — Marcel Proust

Like a kaleidoscope which is every now and then given a turn, society arranges successively in different orders elements which one would have supposed immutable, and composes a new pattern. — Marcel Proust

After a certain age our memories are so intertwined with one another that what we are thinking of, the book we are reading, scarcely matters any more. We have put something of ourselves everywhere, everything is fertile, everything is dangerous, and we can make discoveries no less precious than in Pascal's Pensées in an advertisement for soap. — Marcel Proust

A fashionable milieu is one in which everybody's opinion is made up of the opinion of all the others. Has everybody a different opinion? Then it is a literary milieu. — Marcel Proust

The heart changes...but we learn of it only from reading or by imagination; for in reality its alteration, like that of certain natural phenomena, is so gradual that, even if we are able to distinguish, successively, each of its different states, we are still spared the actual sensation of change. — Marcel Proust

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. — Marcel Proust

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. — Marcel Proust

For what we suppose to be our love or our jealousy is never a single, continuous and indivisible passion. It is composed of an infinity of successive loves, of different jealousies, each of which is ephemeral, although by their uninterrupted multiplicity they give us the impression of continuity, the illusion of unity. — Marcel Proust

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. — Marcel Proust

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. — Marcel Proust

It's odd how a person always arouses admiration for his moral qualities among the relatives of another with whom he has sexual relations. Physical love, so unjustifiably decried, makes everyone show, down to the least detail, all he has of goodness and self-sacrifice, so that he shines even in the eyes of those nearest to him. — Marcel Proust

The places we have known do not belong solely to the world of space in which we situate them for our greater convenience. They were only a thin slice among contiguous impressions which formed our life at that time; the memory of a certain image is but regret for a certain moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fleeting, alas, as the years. — Marcel Proust

A little insomnia is not without its value in making us appreciate sleep, in throwing a ray of light upon that darkness. — Marcel Proust

Our worst fears, like our greatest hopes, are not outside our powers, and we can come in the end to triumph over the former and to achieve the latter. — Marcel Proust

Theoretically, we know that the world turns, but in fact we do not notice it, the earth on which we walk does not seem to move andwe live on in peace. This is how it is concerning Time in our lives. And to render its passing perceptible, novelists must... have their readers cross ten, twenty, thirty years in two minutes. — Marcel Proust

Perfume is that last and best reserve of the past, the one which when all out tears have run dry, can make us cry again! — Marcel Proust

A man who falls straight into bed night after night, and ceases to live until the moment when he wakes and rises, will surely never dream of making, I don't say great discoveries, but even minor observations about sleep. He scarcely knows that he is asleep. A little insomnia is not without its value in making us appreciate sleep, in throwing a ray of light upon that darkness. — Marcel Proust

We have nothing to fear and a great deal to learn from trees, that vigorours and pacific tribe which without stint produces strengthening essences for us, soothing balms, and in whose gracious company we spend so many cool, silent, and intimate hours. — Marcel Proust

Things don't change, but by and by our wishes change. — Marcel Proust

For although we know that the years pass, that youth gives way to old age, that fortunes and thrones crumble (even the most solid among them) and that fame is transitory, the manner in which—by means of a sort of snapshot—we take cognisance of this moving universe whirled along by Time, has the contrary effect of immobilising it. — Marcel Proust

What a profound significance small things assume when the woman we love conceals them from us. — Marcel Proust

However, the danger in [socially unbalanced relationships] is that the subjection of the woman temporarily calms the man's jealousy but also renders it more demanding. He ends up making his mistress live like those prisoners on whom light is shone day and night in order for them to be better watched. And things always end in tragedy. — Marcel Proust

No exile at the South Pole or on the summit of Mont Blanc separates us more effectively from others than the practice of a hidden vice. — Marcel Proust

To be an artist is to fail, as no other dare to fail... failure is his world and the shrink from it desertion — Marcel Proust

Habit is a second nature which prevents us from knowing the first, of which it has neither the cruelties nor the enchantments. — Marcel Proust

Pleasures are like photographs: in the presence of the person we love, we take only negatives, which we develop later, at home, when we have at our disposal once more our inner dark room, the door of which it is strictly forbidden to open while others are present. — Marcel Proust

Human altruism which is not egoism, is sterile. — Marcel Proust

We love only what we do not wholly possess. — Marcel Proust

Like many intellectuals, he was incapable of saying a simple thing in a simple way. — Marcel Proust

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. — Marcel Proust

Our passions shape our books, repose writes them in the intervals. — Marcel Proust

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. — Marcel Proust

I have a horror of sunsets; they're so romantic, so operatic. — Marcel Proust

Conversation, which is friendship's mode of expression, is a superficial digression which gives us nothing worth acquiring. We may talk for a lifetime without doing more than indefinitely repeat the vacuity of a minute. — Marcel Proust

We live not alone but chained to a creature of a different kingdom: our body. — Marcel Proust

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. — Marcel Proust

A language which we do not know is a fortress sealed. — Marcel Proust

The fixity of a habit is generally in direct proportion to its absurdity. — Marcel Proust

Desire makes everything blossom — Marcel Proust

At the heart of our friendly or purely social relations, there lurks a hostility momentarily cured but recurring by fits and starts. — Marcel Proust

The charms of the passing woman are generally in direct ratio to the swiftness of our passage. — Marcel Proust

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

To the pure all things are pure! — Marcel Proust

The most familiar precepts are not always the truest. — Marcel Proust

Happiness serves hardly any other purpose than to make unhappiness possible. — Marcel Proust

Life Lessons by Marcel Proust

1. Life is fleeting and we should appreciate and savor every moment. Marcel Proust's writing emphasizes the importance of living in the present and cherishing the little details that make life beautiful.
2. We should strive to find beauty in the mundane and appreciate the small moments of joy that make life worth living. Proust's writing encourages readers to find joy in the everyday and to recognize the beauty in the small moments.
3. We should strive to be true to ourselves and to never forget our own identity. Proust's writing emphasizes the importance of staying true to oneself and never compromising one's values and beliefs.