Marcel Proust was a French essayist, novelist and critic, better known for his phenomenal work in ‘A la recherché temps perdu’ (In Search of lost time), which was pseudo autobiographical in nature, narrated in a stream-of-conscious style. He is considered as one of the most influential writers of the 20th century by the English critics. Here is a collection of Marcel Proust quotes on love, intellect, gratitude, wisdom & more!
“Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.”
“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”
“Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.”
“Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.”
“Always try to keep a patch of sky above your life.”
“We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.”
“Love is a striking example of how little reality means to us.”
“It comes so soon, the moment when there is nothing left to wait for.”
“If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less, but to dream more, to dream all the time.”
“Reading is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.”
“Desire makes everything blossom; possession makes everything wither and fade.”
“We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full.”
“If we are to make reality endurable, we must all nourish a fantasy or two.”
“One cannot change, that is to say become a different person, while continuing to acquiesce to the feelings of the person one has ceased to be.”
“All our final decisions are made in a state of mind that is not going to last.”
“The only true paradise is a paradise lost.”
“The bonds that unite us to another human being are sanctified when he or she adopts the same point of view as ourselves in judging one of our imperfections.”
“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.”
“To be an artist is to fail, as no other dare to fail... failure is his world and the shrink from it desertion.”
“Happiness serves hardly any other purpose than to make unhappiness possible.”
“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.”
“It is not only by dint of lying to others, but also of lying to ourselves, that we cease to notice that we are lying.”
“Perhaps the immobility of the things that surround us is forced upon them by our conviction that they are themselves, and not anything else, and by the immobility of our conceptions of them.”
“In my cowardice I became at once a man, and did what all we grown men do when face to face with suffering and injustice; I preferred not to see them.”
