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
thoughtful power thinking
Knowing does not always allow us to prevent, but at least the things that we know, we hold them, if not in our hands, but at leastin our thoughts where we may dispose of them at our whim, which gives us the illusion of power over them.
spring flower kissing
Every kiss provokes another. Oh, in those earliest days of love how naturally the kisses spring to life! So closely, in their profusion, do they crowd together that lovers would find it as hard to count the kisses exchanged in an hour as to count the flowers in a meadow in May...
eye people looks
There are people whose faces assume an unaccustomed beauty and majesty the moment they cease to look out of their eyes.
home dark doors
Pleasures are like photographs: in the presence of the person we love, we take only negatives, which we develop later, at home, when we have at our disposal once more our inner dark room, the door of which it is strictly forbidden to open while others are present.
history doe has-beens
The only thing that does not change is that at any and every time it appears that there have been great changes.
passion familiar
It is only with the passions of others that we are ever really familiar, and what we come to discover about our own can only be learned from them.
language fortresses knows
A language which we do not know is a fortress sealed.
suffering needs states
To a great extent, suffering is a sort of need felt by the organism to make itself familiar with a new state, which makes it uneasy, to adapt its sensibility to that state.
feelings assuming egotistical
Nobility is often no more than the inner aspect which our egotistical feelings assume when we have not yet named and classified them.
ignorance law sophisticated
According to a charming law of nature which is evident even in the most sophisticated societies, we live in complete ignorance of whatever we love.
grief dust leaving
There is in this world in which everything wears out, everything perishes, one thing that crumbles into dust, that destroys itself still more completely, leaving behind still fewer traces of itself than Beauty: namely Grief.
purity chastity confidence-in-others
To the pure all things are pure!
relationship mistake choices
It is a mistake to speak of a bad choice in love, since, as soon as a choice exists, it can only be bad.
honor causes position
Let a prize lower my position, if it causes me to be read; that I prefer immediately to all the honors.