Marcel Proust Quotes

Out of the fresh little green hearts of their foliage the lilacs raised inquisitively over the fence of the park their plumes of white or purple blossom, which glowed, even in the shade, with the sunlight in which they had been bathed.

And each time the cowardice that deters us from every difficult task, every important enterprise, has urged me to leave the thing alone, to drink my tea and to think merely of the worries of today and my hopes for tomorrow, which can be brooded over painlessly.

An hour is not merely an hour, it is a vase filled with perfumes, with sounds, with projects, with climates. What we call reality is a relation between those sensations and those memories which simultaneously encircle us … that unique relation which the writer must discover in order that he may link two different states of being together forever in a phase.

The lie, the perfect lie, about people we know, about the relations we have with them, about our motive for some action, formulated in totally different terms, the lie as to what we are, whom we love, what we feel with regard to people who love us … that lie is one of the few things in the world that can open windows for us on to what is new and unknown, that can awaken in us sleeping senses for the contemplation of universes that otherwise we should never have known.

Anything we have not had to decipher, to bring to light by our own effort, anything which was already clearly visible, is not our own.

What an abyss of uncertainty, whenever the mind feels overtaken by itself; when it, the seeker, is at the same time the dark region through which it must go seeking and where all its equipment will avail it nothing. Seek? More than that: create. It is face to face with something which does not yet exist, which it alone can make actual, which it alone can bring into the light of day.

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.

Mystery is not about traveling to new places but about looking with new eyes.

I spent many a charming evening talking and playing with Albertine, but none so sweet as when I was watching her sleep.

If we find as many surprises as on visiting a house of plain exterior which inside is full of hidden treasures, torture-chambers, skeletons, when we discover the true lives of other people, the real beneath the apparent universe, we are no less surprised if, in place of the image that we have made of ourself with the help of all the things that people have said to us, we learn from the terms in which they speak of us in our absence what an entirely different image they have been carrying in their own minds of us and of our life

به نظر من، فقط دو دسته آدم وجود دارند: آنهایی که بزرگوارند و آنهایی که نیستند، و من به سنی رسیده ام که دیگر باید انتخاب کرد، باید یک بار و برای همیشه تصمیم بگیری کی ها را دوست داشته باشی و کی ها را ول کنی، با آنهایی که دوست داری یکی بشوی و برای جبران وقتی که با بقیه هدر داده ای تا دم مرگ از آنها جدا نشوی.

Seus longos olhos azuis - mais alongados - não tinham guardado a mesma forma; continuavam sim da mesma cor, mas pareciam ter passado ao estado líquido. A tal ponto que, quando os fechava, era como quando com cortinas se impede de ver o mar.

Dreams are not to be converted into reality, that we know; we would not form any, perhaps, were it not for desire, and it is useful to us to form them in order to see them fail and to be instructed by their failure.

It is our noticing them that puts things in a room, our growing used to them that takes them away again and clears a space for us.

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