Marcel Proust Quotes – Discovering the Wisdom of a Literary Genius
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.
Time, which sees all things, has found you out.
Only through art can we emerge from ourselves and know what another person sees.
The only true voyage of discovery, the only fountain of Eternal Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another.
The real act of discovery consists not in finding new lands but in seeing with new eyes.
The only paradise is paradise lost.
People do not die for us immediately, but remain bathed in a sort of aura of life which bears no relation to true immortality but through which they continue to occupy our thoughts in the same way as when they were alive.
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.
Love is space and time measured by the heart.
People wish to learn to swim and at the same time to keep one foot on the ground.
The only true voyage of discovery, the only fountain of Eternal Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another.
Time, which sees all things, has found you out.
We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full.
Love is a reciprocal torture.
For each one of us is alone in the world.
What is the source of our first suffering? It lies in the fact that we hesitated to speak. It was born in the moment when we accumulated silent things within us.
There are moments when the body is as numinous as words, days when one sees with the eyes of the body and the soul inside one.
Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself. The writer’s work is only a kind of optical instrument he provides the reader so he can discern what he might never have seen in himself without this book. The reader’s recognition in himself of what the book says is the proof of the book’s truth.
Ultimately Word and Reality are as inseparable as Being and Time.
Illness is the doctor to whom we pay most heed; to kindness, to knowledge, we make promises only; pain we obey.
People who dream when they sleep at night know of a special kind of happiness which the world of the day holds not, a placid ecstasy, and ease of heart, that are like honey on the tongue. They also know that the real glory of dreams lies in their atmosphere of unlimited freedom. It is not the freedom of the dictator, who enforces his own will on the world, but the freedom of the artist, who has no will, who is free of will. The pleasure of the true dreamer does not lie in the substance of the dream, but in this: that there things happen without any interference from his side, and altogether outside his control.
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.
Only through art can we emerge from our own selves and know what another person sees.
Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.
For a long time, I used to go to bed early.
Illness is the doctor to whom we pay most heed; to kindness, to knowledge, we make promises only; pain we obey.
Three-quarters of the misery and misunderstandings in the world would finish if people were to put on the shoes of their adversaries and understood their points of views.
Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy; they are charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.
To get out of the alpine stroll of my memory, I have only to change my point of view.
Only through art can we emerge from our own selves and know what another person sees.
The artist vocation is to send light into the human heart.
We don’t receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.
Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.
The true paradises are the paradises that we have lost.
The bonds between ourselves and another person exist only in our minds. Memory as it grows fainter relaxes them, and notwithstanding the illusion by which we want to be duped and which, out of love, friendship, politeness, deference, duty, we dupe other people, we exist alone. Man is the creature who cannot escape from himself, who knows other people only in himself, and when he asserts the contrary, he is lying.
We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full.
Let us be grateful to people who make us happy, they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.
Do not wait for life. Do not long for it. Be aware, always and at every moment, that the miracle is in the here and now.
The only real sea voyage, the only fountain of eternal youth, would not be the visit to other countries, but the possession of another vision, viewing the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, so that each ray of the universe could be brought to us through a hundred senses; to release us from an egoism that resembles the relief of sleep.
A powerful idea communicates some of its power to whoever challenges it.
A taste for simplicity cannot last for long, the lure of the complex is constantly increasing.
There are few men who dare to publish to the world the prayers they make to God.
We arise from nights that are quasocrevices in the battles of darkness and ascend the successive altitudes.
Everything is subject to its own time and nothing is exempt from the fate of return: we advance by accumulation and descent.
By a peculiar calculus the false and empty compliments which others pay us are contrary to our nature.
We think that we no longer love when we no longer suffer.
He forced himself to go on thinking, in this intermingling of his own worrd and those of others, so that there at least he could have his being.
As a child, I had always been disliked by my parents and was kept at a distance by them.