Marcel Proust Quotes That Are in search of lost time, and

Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.

We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.

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.

Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.

One must never miss an opportunity of quoting things by others which are always more interesting than those one thinks up oneself.

Sometimes in this life, under the stress of an exceptional emotion, people do say what they think.

My destination is no longer a place, rather a new way of seeing.

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

Everything great in the world comes from neurotics.

They alone have founded our religions and composed our masterpieces.

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.

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

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

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

Let us be grateful to people who make us happy.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

A change in the weather is sufficient to recreate the world and ourselves.

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.

Even though our lives wander, our memories remain in one place.

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.

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.

Love is space and time measured by the heart.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Instead of seeking new landscapes, develop new eyes.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

It is often hard to bear the tears that we ourselves have caused.

An hour is not merely an hour, it is a vase full of scents and sounds and projects and climates.

We become moral when we are unhappy.