Marcel Proust – 22 Quotes

22 Quotes by Marcel Proust

Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and composed our masterpieces.

– 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

Only through art can we emerge from ourselves and know what another person sees.

– Marcel Proust

A change in the weather is sufficient to recreate the world and ourselves.

– 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

A powerful idea communicates some of its strength to him who challenges it.

– 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

Let us be grateful to people who make us happy, they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.

– Marcel Proust

Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.

– Marcel Proust

Happiness serves hardly any other purpose than to make unhappiness possible.

– Marcel Proust

Let us leave pretty women to men devoid of imagination.

– Marcel Proust

Like many intellectuals, he was incapable of saying a simple thing in a simple way.

– 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

Illness is the doctor to whom we pay most heed to kindness, to knowledge, we make promise only pain we obey.

– 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

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

Love is space and time measured by the heart.

– 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

Time, which changes people, does not alter the image we have retained of them.

– 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

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