Marcel Proust Quotes - Page 2

... the idea that 'Life' contains situations more interesting and more romantic than all the romances ever written.

And if she had appeared, would I have dared to speak to her?

We have such numerous interests in our lives that it is not uncommon, on a single occasion, for the foundations of a happiness that does not yet exist to be laid down alongside the intensification of a grief from which we are still suffering.

... the reigns of the kings and queens who are portrayed as kneeling with clasped hands in the windows of churches, were stained by oppression and bloodshed.

It is the tragedy of other people that they are merely showcases for the very perishable collections of one's own mind.

[...] to me a new book was not one of a number of similar objects, but was like an individual man, unmatched, and with no cause of existence beyond himself [...]

No doubt my books too, like my mortal being, would eventually die, one day. But one has to resign oneself to dying. One accepts the thought that in ten years oneself, in a hundred years one's books, will not exist. Eternal duration is no more promised to books than it is to men.

The fault I find in our journalism is that it forces us to take an interest in some fresh triviality or other everyday, whereas only three or four books in a lifetime give us anything that is of real importance.

The time which we have at our disposal every day is elastic; the passions that we feel expand it, those that we inspire contract it; and habit fills up what remains.

I never allow myself to be influenced in the smallest degree either by atmospheric disturbances or by the arbitrary divisions of what is known as Time.

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

There are optical errors in time as there are in space.

Love is space and time made perceptible to the heart.

...the novelist has brought us to that state, in which, as in all purely mental states, every emotion is multiplied tenfold, into which his book comes to disturb us as might a dream, but a dream more lucid, and of a more lasting impression than those which comes to us in sleep;

Dinner-parties bore us because our imagination is absent, and reading interests us because it is keeping us company.

Let us leave pretty women to men with no imagination.

... until it had acquired the strength to create in my mind a fresh example of absolute, unproductive beauty...

My dears, laugh at me if you like; it is not conventionally beautiful, but there is something in its quaint old face which pleases me. If it could play the piano, I am sure it would really play.

The beauty of images lies behind things, the beauty of ideas in front of them.

To see how pretty an old woman once was, it is not enough just to look at each feature; they must be translated.