~ Marcel Proust Quotes ~

[MysteRy]

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.

[MysteRy]

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.

[MysteRy]

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.

[MysteRy]

That which we remember of our conduct is ignored by our closest neighbour; but that which we have forgotten having said or even what we never said will cause laughter even into the next world.

[MysteRy]

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.

[MysteRy]

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.

[MysteRy]

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.

[MysteRy]

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.

[MysteRy]

Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and composed our masterpieces. Never will the world know all it owes to them nor all they have suffered to enrich us.

[MysteRy]

Until I saw Chardin's painting I never realized how much beauty lay around me in my parents' house in the half-cleared table in the corner of a tablecloth left awry in the knife beside the empty oyster shell.

[MysteRy]

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.

[MysteRy]

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.

[MysteRy]

I perceived that to express those impressions to write that essential book which is the only true one a great writer does not in the current meaning of the word invent it but since it exists already in each one of us interprets it. The duty and the task of a writer are those of an interpreter.