The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.
– Marcel Proust
Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value-judgments. An artist recreates those aspects of reality which represent his fundamental view of man's nature.
– Marcel Proust
As long as men are free to ask what they must, free to say what they think, free to think what they will, freedom can never be lost and science can never regress.
– 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
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
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
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
People can have many different kinds of pleasure. The real one is that for which they will forsake the others.
– Marcel Proust
People wish to learn to swim and at the same time to keep one foot on the ground.
– 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
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
Let us be grateful to people who make us happy: They are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.
– Marcel Proust
The one thing more difficult than following a regimen is not imposing it on others.
– Marcel Proust
The only paradise is paradise lost.
– Marcel Proust
Desire makes everything blossom; possession makes everything wither and fade.
– Marcel Proust
Words do not change their meanings so drastically in the course of centuries as, in our minds, names do in the course of a year or two.
– Marcel Proust
We must never be afraid to go too far, for truth lies beyond.
– Marcel Proust
We don't receive wisdom we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.
– Marcel Proust
Time, which changes people, does not alter the image we have retained of them.
– 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
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
Only through art can we emerge from ourselves and know what another person sees.
– Marcel Proust
Like many intellectuals, he was incapable of saying a simple thing in a simple way.
– Marcel Proust
Let us leave pretty women to men devoid of imagination.
– 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
If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time.
– Marcel Proust
Happiness serves hardly any other purpose than to make unhappiness possible.
– Marcel Proust
Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.
– 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
A powerful idea communicates some of its strength to him who challenges it.
– Marcel Proust
A change in the weather is sufficient to recreate the world and ourselves.
