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
lying believe ends
Friendship is in the end no more than: " . . . a lie which seeks to make us believe that we are not irremediably alone."
reality two fantasy
If we are to make reality endurable, we must all nourish a fantasy or two.
giving long mind
Having a body is in itself the greatest threat to the mind... The body encloses the mind in a fortress; before long the mind is besieged on all sides, and in the end the mind has to give itself up.
reality needs easy
Any mental activity is easy if it need not take reality into account.
men imagination suffering
Often it is just lack of imagination that keeps a man from suffering very much.
change wish dont-change
Things don't change, but by and by our wishes change.
lying effort obscurity
What we have not had to decipher, to elucidate by our own efforts, what was clear before we looked at it, is not ours. From ourselves comes only that which we drag forth from the obscurity which lies within us, that which to others is unknown.
lying reality knowing
But sometimes the future is latent in us without our knowing it, and our supposedly lying words foreshadow an imminent reality.
lying love-is suffering
How can we have the courage to wish to live, how can we make a movement to preserve ourselves from death, in a world where love is provoked by a lie and consists solely in the need of having our sufferings appeased by whatever being has made us suffer?
believe thinking perspective
We believe we can change things according to our wishes because that's the only happy solution we can see. We don't think of what usually happens and what is also a happy solution; things don't change, but by and by our wishes change.
men understanding mind
The reason why a work of genius is not easily admired from the first is that the man who has created it is extraordinary, that few other men resemble him. It is his work itself that, by fertilising the rare minds capable of understanding it, will make them increase and multiply.
people mind tragedy
It is the tragedy of other people that they are to us merely showcases for the very perishable collections of our own mind.
book reading unhappy-childhood
There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book.
men profound feelings
A woman whom we need and who makes us suffer elicits from us a whole gamut of feelings far more profound and vital than a man of genius who interests us.