Marcel Proust
Marcel Proust
Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proustwas a French novelist, critic, and essayist best known for his monumental novel À la recherche du temps perdu, published in seven parts between 1913 and 1927. He is considered by many to be one of the greatest authors...
NationalityFrench
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth10 July 1871
CountryFrance
love intelligent men
People who are not in love fail to understand how an intelligent man can suffer because of a very ordinary woman. This is like being surprised that anyone should be stricken with cholera because of a creature so insignificant as the common bacillus.
past essence smell
But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.
mind lasting-love resolution
It is always during a passing state of mind that we make lasting resolutions.
liquid palate crumbs
No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me.
reading communication miracle
Reading is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.
love-is people frustrated
Love is not vain because it is frustrated, but because it is fulfilled. The people we love turn to ashes when we posess them.
with one image he would make that beauty explode into me.
heartbreak reality long
In reality, in love there is a permanent suffering which joy neutralizes, renders virtual delays, but which can at any moment become what it would have become long earlier if one had not obtained what one wanted -- atrocious.
mind desire resemblance
There's nothing like desire to prevent the things one says from having any resemblance to the things in one's mind.
love-is anxiety desire
For, just as in the beginning it is formed by desire, so afterwards love is kept in existence only by painful anxiety.
simple stupidity intellectual
Like many intellectuals, he was incapable of saying a simple thing in a simple way.
pain kindness doctors
Illness is the doctor to whom we pay most heed; to kindness, to knowledge, we make promise only; pain we obey.
intelligent doctors gambling
Three-quarters of the sicknesses of intelligent people come from their intelligence. They need at least a doctor who can understand this sickness.
knowledge desire tiny
The tiny, initial clue ... by allowing us to imagine what we do not know, stimulates a desire for knowledge.