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 real people
The stellar universe is not so difficult to understand as the real actions of other people, especially of the people with whom we are in love.
love-is thinking suffering
We were resigned to suffering, thinking that we loved outside ourselves, and we perceive that our love is a function of our sorrow, that our love perhaps is our sorrow..
stupid mad serious
As soon as he ceased to be mad he became merely stupid. There are maladies we must not seek to cure because they alone protect us from others that are more serious.
heart opposites type
A certain similarity exists, although the type evolves, between all the women we love, a similarity that is due to the fixity of our own temperament, which it is that chooses them, eliminating all those who would not be at once our opposite and our complement, fitted that is to say to gratify our senses and to wring our heart.
book aids found
Each reader reads only what is already within himself. The book is only a sort of optical instrument which the writer offers to the reader to enable the latter to discover in himself what he would not have found but for the aid of the book.
reading men literary-merit
A man of letters, merely by reading a phrase, can estimate exactly the literary merit of its author.
love-is mind desire
There can be no peace of mind in love, since the advantage one has secured is never anything but a fresh starting-point for future desires.
beauty loss world
The loss of a sense adds as much beauty to the world as its acquisition.
fashion clothes world
Indeed, among the lesser auxiliaries to success in love, an absence, the declining of an invitation to dinner, an unintentional, unconscious harshness are of more service than all the cosmetics and fine clothes in the world.
giving magic firsts
I drank a second mouthful in which I find nothing more than in the first, then a third which gives me rather less than the second. It is time to stop; the potion is losing its magic.
mistake years medicine
Medicine being a compendium of the successive and contradictory mistakes of medical practitioners, when we summon the wisest of them to our aid, the chances are that we may be relying on a scientific truth the error of which will be recognized in a few years time.
pain past survival
I understood that all the material of a literary work was in my past life, I understood that I had acquired it in the midst of frivolous amusements, in idleness, in tenderness and in pain, stored up by me without my divining its destination or even its survival, as the seed has in reserve all the ingredients which will nourish the plant.
memories grief heart
Memory nourishes the heart, and grief abates.
spiritual journey hints
Which of course is followed by: For those who have Awareness, a hint is quite enough. For the multitudes of heedless mere knowledge is useless. Haji Bektash Veli We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.