Looking for the best and inspirational Marcel Proust quotes?
Marcel Proust is known as one of the greatest writers in history. And was born in 1871 into a middle-class Parisian family. His “Remembrance of Things Past” is a novel that covers the life and times of a young Frenchman named Marcel. The narrator’s experiences and memories form the heart of this work. He believes that it is principally on language that his work will last forever, for “…it alone possesses the magical power to evoke from hidden depths within us echoes which can never die.”
Proust’s work has been recognized by many as one of the most important in French literature, and he has been called “the first modern author” for having broken free from classicism and tradition to create something new. He was also known for his literary taste and was considered an arbiter of taste during his lifetime.
He is best known for his novel “In Search of Lost Time, published in 1913-1927. His work was considered a classic of modern European literature and one of the most influential books ever written.
Check out his most famous and inspirational quotes that will change your life.
43 Most Inspiring Marcel Proust Quotes
“People don’t know when they are happy. They’re never so unhappy as they think they are.”
“Reality is never more than a first step towards an unknown on the road to which one can never progress very far.”
“The true paradises are the paradises that we have lost.”
“If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less, but to dream more, to dream all the time.”
“People wish to learn to swim and at the same time to keep one foot on the ground.”
“All the mind’s activity is easy if it is not subjected to reality.”
“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.”
“We must never be afraid to go too far, for truth lies beyond.”
“We do not succeed in changing things according to our desire, but gradually our desire changes.”
“Only through art can we emerge from ourselves and know what another person sees.”
“Pleasures are like photographs: in the presence of the person we love, we take only negatives, which we develop later, at home, when we have at our disposal once more our inner dark room, the door of which it is strictly forbidden to open while others are present.”
“Nine tenths of the ills from which intelligent people suffer spring from their intellect.”
“Desire makes everything blossom; possession makes everything wither and fade. ”
“People have many different kinds of pleasure. The real one is that for which they will forsake the others.”
“We are all of us obliged, if we are to make reality endurable, to nurse a few little follies in ourselves.”
“When you really love a writer, what you want is an opinion from them on everything in the world.”
“Let us be grateful to people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls bloom.”
“The bonds that unite another person to our self exist only in our mind.”
“Always try to keep a patch of sky above your life.”
“It comes so soon, the moment when there is nothing left to wait for.”
“Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.”
“All our final decisions are made in a state of mind that is not going to last.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.”
“We don’t receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.”
“In reality, every reader is, while reading, the reader of his own self.”
“We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full.”
“The charms of a passing woman are usually in direct relation to the speed of her passing.”
“Reading is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.”
“With one image he would make that beauty explode into me.”
“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.”
“We don’t receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.”
“My destination is no longer a place, rather a new way of seeing.”
“If we are to make reality endurable, we must all nourish a fantasy or two.”
“Let us be grateful to people who make us happy, they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.”
“Everything great in the world is done by neurotics; they alone founded our religions and created our masterpieces.”
“The remembrence of things past is not nessecarly the remeberance of things as they were”
“One becomes moral as soon as one is unhappy.”
“But,instead of what our imagination makes us suppose and which we worthless try to discover,life gives us something that we could hardly imagine.”
“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.”
“Most of our faculties lie dormant because they can rely upon Habit, which knows what there is to be done and has no need of their services.”
“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”
“Time, which changes people, does not alter the image we have of them.”
